I finally went to the doctor this week for a pain in my neck. I figured it was just a muscle strain (it is) but they took an x-ray to check the bones. My wife works there so I was able to go “behind the curtain” to see my x-rays. I was looking for a wall light fixture to pin the sheets of x-rays on but there was not one there. Instead they had a scanner like machine that they placed the x-rays into & then it uploaded the images to the computer. So we were able to look at the images on a nice big screen. Pretty cool I thought. You could basically do anything you could with a regular photo. They moved it around and zoomed in on the bones they wanted to look at. The picture was crystal clear and much better than the old school way of doing this procedure. Now I have no idea how much this little gizmo cost but I reckon it was close to the cost of a small car. I don’t know if it is worth the cost but I do know it is better in many ways: visible details, digital storage, easily copied, can be emailed to the patient or a specialist. Things like this make better medical options available to us common geeks. I was just glad I got to see it in action.
