Nuclear Medicine

The previous post was about the shameful and dark underside of nuclear research on human beings.  This one and the follow-ups will discuss some of the useful medical advances that our understanding of radiation have made possible.

I don't know how much the unethical human radiation experiments contributed (if any) to modern medicine.  What I do know is that entirely new methods for imaging and treating disease are now available that were not available prior to the nuclear age.  There is a lot of genius involved with using radiation to make people well.

Nuclear Medicine broadly falls into two categories;  I will be discussing each one in separate posts of their own.  Those categories are Imaging and Therapy.  Both are interesting fields - they are at the intersection of radiation and biology, only this time for the good of mankind.

Nuclear Imaging - a PET (Positron Emission Tomography) scan.

Nuclear Therapy - an early linear accelerator for radiation therapy on an inoperable cancer.