Today We Celebrate Radiology
Today is the International Day of Radiology – a special day to highlight and celebrate all that radiology is and all medical Imaging and imaging guided therapy have added to the practice of medicine since the first discovery of x-rays. Today is the 122nd anniversary of the discovery by Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen of the x-ray – an amazing discovery which launched new ways of seeing the body and the diseases that can affect them. This whole week we are celebrating radiology and in particular our radiology technologists. We applaud them for all they do in caring for our patients and keeping us going day after day.
Radiology is a unique medical discipline. Our focus is all of imaging and imaging guided techniques. We see patients of all ages, and image the body with techniques from the now relatively simple x-ray to complex imaging with magnets and sound waves. Imaging can help us screen for diseases like breast and lung cancer, can assess the health of a fetus, can help discover with precision the extent of injuries and can help doctors accurately stage cancers. All of this and much more makes up a radiologist’s daily work.
So who is your radiologist? Your radiologist is a medical doctor who went through four years of medical school, followed by a residency in radiology lasting from between 4 to 6 years. Specializing in imaging means understanding the physics behind all of the imaging techniques, careful attention to detail so that everything about the procedure or exam is done with the safest possible technique, and commitment to finding compete answers to the questions which brought you to our office.
On this International Day of Radiology, we join others across the world in acknowledging those whose discoveries helped bring our discipline to life. Radiologists choose this particular day to celebrate to highlight the achievements of the German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen. The first human he imaged was his wife, a shot of her wedding-ringed left hand. And with that simple radiograph, a discipline vital to all of medicine was born.
