Medicine And Nuclear Science Do Mix

In the world of medicine there are a number of tools and equipment that doctors use all of the time to help diagnose and treat patients

. Have you ever stopped to wonder how those tools came about or who invented them? Have you ever considered the fact that a medical instrument is just that, an instrument that may or may not be able to do the job right. Have wondered if your doctor was using the right instrument for the job he was doing?

Think for a minute how some of us, when we need a hammer and there is not one right there, but there is a shoe will use the shoe as a hammer. That is not the right tool for the job, but we use it because it is conveniently close. Do you think that your doctor ever does that? Would not be a pretty thing would it?

Among the instruments that a doctor can use is a piece of equipment called a gamma camera. The gamma camera, sometimes called the Anger camera named after its inventor Hal Anger, was invented back in the early 1950's and is still around today, in 2010, nearly seventy years later. It has stood the test of time. Perhaps the gamma camera was invented well before its time and that is why it has been around so long.

On the gamma camera is a part called the collimator. Nuclear science collimators act somewhat like a colander does. The collimator acts as a funnel though, instead of a strainer. It agthers all of the gamma cameras coming from the patient and channel them into the head of the camera that contains a lot of crystals.

You may wonder about gamma rays coming from the patient and ask yourself if we naturally are emitting gamma rays. The answer to that is simple. We do not emit gamma rays naturally, but we do when we are fed a solution through a drink or through an injection that contains some low levels of radiation. Those gamma rays that we emit are what make it possible for the gamma camera to work. As you might have guessed, the gamma camera is named for the gamma rays because that is the core of what makes it work.

What we do without the medical advances that we have seen over the last one hundred years? However, there will come a time when we think of medicine that is practiced today as a bit prehistoric as well.

by: Art Gib

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