A new report recently came out that Americans are too fat now to receive X-rays and other medical care that can be beneficial.
64 percent of the US population is now obese and of that 64 percent most are unable to receive full medical care because they are either too big to fit into scanners, or their fat is too dense for X-rays or sounds waves to penetrate.
Obesity causes the images from scans and X-rays to appear unclear. When writing up reports, Radiologists classify these images as “images that are limited due to body habitus.” Overall, 7,778 of 5,253,014 reports were “habitus” related. This number has doubled over the last 15 years!
People that are most affected are large pregnant women. Dr Raul Uppot, Radiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital said “because the ultrasound beam does not get to the organs or get to them adequately enough, we can not get to them.” This can cause medical issues with the fetus to be undiscovered and be harmful as well to the mother.
Some manufactures are starting to make MRI machines with larger bore holes. The cost of these machines is in the millions and only a handful of institutions are able to purchase these.
Obviously dieting and exercising is the answer to losing weight and there many choices to set you on the right path. Perhaps using PumpOne, an image based personal training program for the I-Pod, Treo and other handheld devices, would be a logical choice.
As Dr. Uppot says "for the patient, not knowing what is going on is a big issue. If you tell a patient 'I am sorry -- we just can't sit you on our CT scanner,' that is devastating to hear."
Posted by Joshua Blaylock on July 28, 2006 2:34 PM
| Permalink
