Surgery versus Radiology

Comment

Comment by DR.Manjula Dhinakar on October 5, 2010 at 1:26pm

As Gasper said one sholud follow time honoured tools in diagnosis.Thanks to reporting Law in California

Comment by Gaspar-Alberto Motta-Ramirez on August 16, 2010 at 8:49am

The video makes me reminding a paper from Richard S. Heilman, MD, "What Did the CT Scan Show?", RadioGraphics 2002; 22:894:
Resident: “Your patient was admitted a couple of hours ago.”
Attending Physician: “What did the CT scan show?”
Resident: “It’s ordered, but the radiology resident gave me a hard time. He wanted to know if I had seen the patient and what we were looking for.”
The query about what they might be looking for on the CT scan could not be answered because they simply
hadn’t any idea what it might show. They were ordering the study to see what a radiologic evaluation might turn up, like bird hunters firing blindly into a tree to see if something edible would fall out.
It would be a revealing study to see how many tests are ordered on no other basis than what the
ward clerk of the transferring hospital wrote as the preliminary diagnosis on the patient’s transfer papers.
Until the stainless steel medical oracle becomes a reality, we all would do well to take a step
back and acknowledge that testing, however great our instruments, should follow the use of timehonored
tools in diagnosis.
What an old-fashioned idea: actually seeing patients and thinking about them before ordering tests. I can almost see the smiles on the faces of the hip new generation of physicians.