Tuesday, April 20, 2010

What Does a Fractured Tibia Look Like?

My Dad worked with x-ray technology for a couple dozen years. As a child, when I saw him in his workshop downstairs, working with electronic gadgets, soldering guns, and oscilloscopes, I imagined his world to be an esoteric one, a world of concepts and ideas that the mere mortal, let alone child, could never hope to fathom.
With so much advancement in the world of x-ray and scanning technology, it seemed to me that an x-ray machine was an incredible thing whose images could tell us such detailed and amazing things about the human body. Now, I see things a bit differently.
Having had plenty of experience looking over x-ray images of my teeth with my dentist, and now at the images of your fractured leg, Rai, I see that the information given by an x-ray image is rather rudimentary. There is little detail at all. Dentists and doctors relying on x-ray images do nothing more than look for shadowy areas in the image. Shadows and discolorations are as much detail as the images can give. Your fracture is nothing more than a dark line on your bone. That's all the information we have. We see nothing more about the nature of the fracture. Such high technology gives such simple information. To avoid looking completely ignorant, though, I'll admit that I know that x-ray technology is quite old now and the latest in color, 3D imaging has made incredible gains!

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