Thank you for joining me again this evening for our nightly podcasts. I perform these podcasts in the hopes that you will be able to educate yourself on the topics discussed so you can make better informed medical decisions regarding your health in the future. I am doctor Harrison Campbell of Restoration Health a premier sugar land chiropractors office. Previously we discussed X-rays and the findings which can be interpreted from them. Tonight, we will focus on reading MRIs with patients.
Similar to X-rays, at Restoration Health a premier sugar land chiropractors office we read the MRIs before we sit down with the patient and report on the findings. We once again look at everything which the image has presented to ensure nothing is missed. I have had MRIs of the brain performed on patients due to lingering effects of concussion after a car accident which has revealed incidental findings that had major implications.
For instance, there was a patient at Restoration Health a premier sugar land chiropractors office that had suffered a concussion during the car accident and still was presenting with headaches and memory difficulty. The MRI came back negative for findings of brain trauma, which was a good prognosis for the patient. What we did find however was a mass near the pituitary gland in the brain. Now, this mass was not from the car accident, but if we had only been looking at issues relevant to the car accident, this would have been missed. In this particular case, we provided the report and he received a CD with the images from the facility and we directed him to the appropriate doctor to help address the issue at hand.
This is why any doctor which reads films needs to address the entire film to just the area of complaint. My mentor for reading X-rays and MRIs once put it this way. Anything on the film, relevant to the injury or not, is relevant to you. You are the doctor. You are reading the film; you are not reading the injury. Therefore, read the film and report on anything which is on the film. That way you can rest assured that even if there is something on the film not related to the reason behind the MRI being performed we at Restoration Health a premier sugar land chiropractors office will discuss abnormal findings and help you find the proper path to dealing with these problems.
Now if you recall the discussion we had on MRIs in the past you will remember that MRIs are the gold standard of imaging. They can depict soft tissue and boney anatomy whereas X-rays are only really good for looking at the bones with the occasional use for soft tissue. What this means for MRIs is that depending on the joint or body area imaged, the number of structures that need to be examined can grow exponentially. However, no matter how many structures need to be viewed sugar land chiropractors will tell you to view them all. If you do not, you are doing a disservice to your patients.
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For the spine, we look at the vertebrae, the intervertebral discs, the vascular structures like arteries depending on which part of the spine, we have nerve roots and the spinal cord. This changes if we are looking at a joint. Let us use the shoulder as an example. Do you recall the anatomy of the shoulder we have discussed previously? We have the shoulder joint itself we need to look at. Then we have the muscles and tendons. We need to carefully look at the rotator cuff. Do you remember which muscle of the rotator cuff was most injured?
We also need to look at the nonrotator cuff muscles like the teres major, the trapezius, deltoid, pectoralis. Each of these muscles will have portions that can be viewed on the MRI, and we need to check all of them for potential problems. This means even if a suspected rotator cuff tear is the initial diagnosis we need to ensure that we look beyond the supraspinatus, and we need to look beyond the rotator cuff.
For sugar land chiropractors a boon of MRI over X-ray is the amount of information we have at our fingers. The MRI, if you recall, takes many images and you compile these slices to from a three-dimensional image from the two-dimensional images. This allows us to view a joint or a muscle from several angles to better understand the problem. It is one thing to diagnose a rotator cuff tear. It is something else entirely to diagnose the supraspinatus is torn at the musculotendinous junction with a three-quarters partial tear. Clearly the second diagnosis provides a better picture in terms of locations but also the severity. You can thank the power of MRI technology for that added clarity when viewing the problem.
There are limitations to this imaging, however. As sugar land chiropractors can tell you, weight-bearing imaging will provide a different view of the tissue than nonweight bearing imaging. The patient movement will also play a factor in how clear the image is. Remember that an MRI takes several shots of a body area in order to provide the three-dimensional image we can look at. Should the patient move when these images are being done it will distort those images and reduce clarity. This means that even though MRIs are the gold standard to imaging they are not perfect.
Thank you for joining me again this evening for another great podcast. I hope you enjoyed the discussion on MRI imaging and how we need to look at those films. As always should you or someone you know require a sugar land chiropractors services or simply have more questions on what was discussed please call Restoration Health today. We would love to schedule you an appointment and get you on the path to better health today. Thank you once again for joining us. Have a good night.