Saying no to CT

Saying no to CTAdvanced CT scanners have revolutionized trauma care and provided physicians with lots of information to aid diagnosis and track treatment progress. Utilization has gone through the roof, which is good news for radiologists and hospitals but bad news for payers. There has been no significant progress in holding the line on imaging costs, the way there has been on drugs, for example.But there is growing concern over the high dosage of radiation that some patients receive from CT scans, according to the Wall Street Journal. A chest CT exposes the patient to 8-10 millisieverts of ionizing radiation. That'Â’s 100 to 1000 times as much as a chest x-ray, and about half of the exposure received by the average atomic bomb survivor in Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Some patients get dozens or even hundreds of scans. No doubt not all those scans are necessary.I've always been leery about medical radiation exposure. My mother was conservative about letting us have our teeth x-rayed, and she was probably right. If payers want to rein in CT costs, they'd be wise to tap patient safety concerns. However, if they aren't careful they will just drive up the use of MRI, which costs even more.