Hi, I’m Dr. Steve Battaglino, and this is your Health Minute. A lot of people ask about x-ray, and why x-ray is important. Is it safe, and there’s a variety of questions that involve x-rays. So, I wanted to talk about it a little bit. X-ray is incredibly safe, especially now that we have digital x-ray systems and high frequency systems that keep the dosage low, so they equate it to the effects on the body, much like a sunburn. In other words, it does have a damaging effect, but it’s slight, and it’s usually dissipated within two or three weeks.

I wanted to show you a little bit about the x-ray. This is a digital x-ray system. It’s state of the art, so there’s no film involved. Also, no processing with chemicals in a dark room, like you would see with traditional x-ray. So, you have a digital x-ray emitter, and then just a digital panel, then it comes to this console here where we capture the images and start to enhance them and crop them. And then we have another station over here, where we continue enhancing the images, we can get a lot of information that we wouldn’t normally have by getting these x-rays.

For example, we can see alignments, we can also see angles and so forth and get an idea of degenerative changes, like arthritic changes. Also, curvatures that aren’t supposed to be there. We can see deformities that exist in the spine. We can do before and after series, which is kind of cool, ’cause we can see actual changes, not only in the way the patient’s feeling, but we can actually mark them side by side and see those changes.

This is a scoliosis patient here, probably tough to see on this view, before and after. You can see the patient’s totally straight. There’s a reversed curvature in the neck, that curve is actually supposed to go this way. So, this is real important to see. There’s another one here where this is getting to be really arthritic and almost fused here, so important to see that. And scoliosis and so forth.

X-ray is a safe way to get really important information that we can’t otherwise glean. It helps us do a better job, and the care becomes much more affordable and much more timely, meaning we can get better results in a quicker amount of time by having this information. So, it’s definitely worth it, and having this state of the art equipment really helps make the exposure time lower, and it helps with a lot of the processing, because a lot of it, we just don’t have to do. So, there’s no chemicals in the office and things like that.

This is Dr. Steve Battaglino, and this has been your Health Minute.