Medical Care Technology

Medical Assistants and Their Role in Health Care

Behind every great company, there is always someone working hard in the background, making sure that everything runs smoothly and working to get all of the tasks for the day completed. In the health care industry, many times this responsibility falls onto the shoulders of medical assistants. They may work in private physicians’ offices or they may work in a hospital setting. Either way, they take care of all types of tasks that come up throughout the course of a day.

Some of the highest paying jobs within this industry involve medical assistants. It usually depends on the specific field in which they work, the tasks that they perform, and the hours that they are needed to work. Some assistants are responsible for all of the paperwork and billing for a medical office. There are some situations when some portions of this job can be completed at home. Others work in a little more medical-intensive position by dealing with paperwork and scheduling appointments and procedures.

Other medical assistants work in a clinic to take care of blood work, lab testing, and even getting patients ready for major operations or procedures. In this case, there is special training to provide medical assistants with a clear understanding of the procedures that a hospital or office adheres to. Finally, there are assistants that specialize in certain fields and can provide help in medical treatments and testing for very specific conditions. In short, the health care industry relies heavily on medical assistants to keep things running smoothly and take care of patients in an individualized way.

Filed Under: Medical Care Professionals Tagged With: Health care industry, Medical assistant, Medical Care Technology

The Various Fields of Study and Opportunities in Medical Physics

Medical physics is one of the key studies behind research and development of medical imaging procedures. A number of different techniques are used here to create a visual representation akin to the internal human body. Medical physicists can conduct both moving and static medical imaging studies. Use of special equipment that experts have designed in the field also helps significantly. Adding to the development of imaging techniques for disease diagnosis, medical physicists are also likely to get involved in applying physics for disease treatment. This can be seen in laser surgeries, endoscopy for minimally invasive processes, and breaking up of kidney stones using hig intensity ultrasounds.

There are many fields for possible study when in the profession of a medical physicist. This ranges from treatment of cancer patients with radiotherapy to use of ultrasound diagnostics in pregnant females. The study can even be applied in veterinary care.

It is encourages that students with an interest in physics and the clinical practice of medicine consider a career as a medical physicist. If the individual is more interested in providing care to patients, he or she can join into clinical practice. This offers numerous opportunities for interaction with patients further down the road. On the other hand, students more drawn to development of new equipment and techniques will want to work in development and research. You’ll want to note that the necessity for teachers is also a primarily permanent and continual one. Very often, you’ll find trained and experienced medical physicists teaching medical technicians and future doctors as well as students of medical physics.

Filed Under: Medical Care Research Tagged With: Medical Care Technology, Medical physics, Physics

Medical Physicists & Purchase of Medical Technology

Often, at large scientific organizations, you’ll fins medical physicists being hired solely for the duty of selecting and evaluation expensive equipment. These professionals become involved in the process of negotiating purchases on high tech machines that cost in the millions. They make sure that the best value for money is always chosen. As part of this task, they will also write out specifications that guarantee you that your hospital or laboratory is only purchasing the equipment needed. It is common to find service contracts and machine prices to be significantly reducible. This is important when buying an expensive item. In fact, figures show the servicing contracts for CT scanners to be around $100,000 every year. Many of the available options on costly equipment are going to be capable of being added for free when you are negotiating with a variety of different providers.

Value for Money

After the purchase of the equipment, a medical physicist will evaluate the effectiveness of the equipment in performance according to specifications. This is done using a challenging test and commission before acceptance. Sometimes, institutions lose their money by scheduling for machines to be replaced regularly in spite of the equipment operating correctly.

Getting a medical physicist involved in the continued maintenance and improvement of your machine will result in an extended lifeline and reliable operations on the equipment. Apart from aiding in purchase of high quality medical technology, you’ll find medical physicists concerned with general medical research as well. Often, this involved application of computers into medicine and of information and theory into diagnostic issues. They also process, store, and recover medical images, measure radioactive quantities within foods and human bodies, and research the temporal and anatomical distribution of radioactive items within the body. Furthermore, they also get involved in the actual creation and development of novel instruments and technology to be used in diagnostic radiology.

Filed Under: Medical Care Technology Tagged With: Medical Care Technology, Medical physics, Medical technology

What a Medical Physicist Does

A medical physicist professional is mainly concerned with 3 fields of study: consultation and clinical services, development and research, as well as teaching. Typically, you’ll find them spreading their time equally amongst the 3 areas.

Clinical Consultation and Services

Several medical physicists are deeply involved and hold responsibilities in the field of treatment and diagnosis. This often involves particular patients taking part in consultations with the physicist. There are also technical consultations with colleagues that are physicians. In the oncology and radiation department, for example, a significant example is presented in the form radiation plan development for patients of cancer. Such processes use internal sources of radioactivity or external beams of radiation.

Development and Investigation

The role of a medical physicist is a very important role on any medical team conducting research. Activities of theirs cover a wide range. Key fields of study like heart disease, cancer, and mental illness are put into focus. With regards to cancer, they mainly work on radiation issues like basic pathways of biological reactions post irradiation, developing novel techniques for accurate measure of radiation, and applying high-energy machinery into treatment of patients.

Training & Teaching

Very often, you’ll find medical physicists to be appointed in faculties at colleges and universities. In such positions, they mainly aid students training to become medical physicists in their study. They also guide other medical students, technologists, and resident physicians. Technologists differ from physicists in that they operate the many different kinds of equipment used in performance of treatment and diagnosis. Furthermore, you’ll find them conducting courses on medical physics, discussing topics like radiobiology and biophysics under that umbrella as well. They also lecture undergraduate and graduate pupils. Organizations like CAMPEP, ACMP, ACR, and AAMP help to maintain respectable standards of education in this field.

All in all, the career of a medical physicist can be a very challenging and rewarding one for those willing to put themselves through the years of hard work and determination. It all pays off in the end though!

Filed Under: Medical Care Professionals Tagged With: Medical Care Technology, Medical physics

How to Handle Side Effects

Medical physics involves using knowledge of medicine to alter the way one’s body works. There are no prescription medications without some side effects. The issue for patients is how to handle those side effects. Some side effects, such as muscle weakness, require that patients stop taking medications because they can be harmful. Other side effects, like dry mouth or nausea, are more annoyances than anything. If you are going to continue with the medicine despite these side effects, then you will need to learn how to manage them.

First try to chart when you take your prescription medication and how you felt to see if you notice any patterns. Perhaps you do better take certain medications before bed, or you may find that you need to have a full stomach to avoid nausea. Medical physics is different for every person, so make sure you know what works best with your body.

The second thing you need to do is find out if there is a way to deal with the side effects easily. For example, if you have problems with your medication making you feel sleep, try eating protein-heavy lunches to help out. You could begin keeping bottled water with you if you get dry mouth. Eat crackers if you have problems with nausea immediately after taking your medication. Having a solid plan to get around these side effects is the best way that you can help yourself move beyond them.

Finally you will want to record your side effects so that you know if the frequency or pattern changes. If so, you will need to contact your doctor immediately. Your doctor will need to determine if the change means that you need to switch medications or dosages or if your body is simply adjusting to the medicine after a long period of time.

Filed Under: General Health Tagged With: Adverse effect, Medical Care Technology, Pharmaceutical drug

What is Medical Physics?

Medical physics is the application of physics principles to medicine. Most of the work that medical physicists do relates to radiography and imaging techniques. Physics in general is the study of the physical world, and much of physics revolves around natural laws, such as the “equal and opposite reaction” idea that Newton proposed and most schoolchildren learn.

Within the medical world, physics is used to see things inside the body that doctors could not see otherwise. X-rays, CT scans, MRIs, and other types of body imaging scans are the work of people who specialize in medical physics.

People who work in medical physics are the “background” of much medical work. They are necessary in hospitals because they are the people who make sure that readings are done properly. They also tend to be those doctors you never see. When you have an x-ray, in many places you will receive a bill from a doctor or radiologist you did not meet. These bills are for someone, usually a medical physicist, reading the image that you had made.

These people are training in reading images and making diagnoses from them in much more depth than a family doctor, or even a specialist in another field. A radiologist is far more likely to see small abnormalities in an imaging scan than another doctor, which is the reason hospitals employ them to read your images before sending them on to your doctor. If you have an in-patient stay at a hospital, then radiologists will read your images there to help with your treatment plan.

Medical physics is a field that is foreign to most people, though the work of the people in this field matter to most people at some point in their lives. So the next time you get a bill for an image reading, remember that these healthcare workers are silent but beneficial in your medical life!

Filed Under: Medical Care Technology Tagged With: Medical Care Technology, Medical physics, Physics

Training for Medical Physics

If you want to be a medical physicist, you have a number of options available, depending on what exactly you want to do. Most of the people who go into this field have degrees in physics or have significant undergraduate work in physics. A bachelor’s degree is only one step on the way to a career in medical physics, however.

Once you have a degree, you will need to apply to graduate schools. The baseline for someone to work as a medical physicist, which will be jobs reading images that people have made in hospitals, is a master’s degree. This degree will allow you to work in the field although you will be under the supervision of a practicing physician.

If you intend to work in research or alone in this field, then you will need to have a doctorate. Some people fill this requirement through medical schools while others attend graduate programs specifically designed for students of medical physics.
The American Association for Medical Physicists includes only 23 programs throughout the United States with programs specifically in medical physics. There are fewer than 50 internships or residencies in the country for this type of medicine, making the competition for these spots fierce.

Students who think they may want to pursue this type of work should begin as soon as they enter college to prepare for acceptance at one of these graduate schools. Then they will need to work extremely hard to land an internship.
Working in this field can be grueling as the work is demanding, and research can take years to end with any positive results. If you are able to work in this field and help make advances to improve patient care, however, then you will be able to feel good about the contribution you have made to your society.

Filed Under: Medical Care Research Tagged With: Medical Care Technology, Medical physics, Physics, United States

Reasons You May Need an MRI

: Image via Wikipedia

Getting an MRI may sound like a scary proposition. Many people have heard of them and know that this type of test involves a major machine, but the mechanics of the machine are a bit of a mystery.

First know that you should tell your doctor about any prescription medication you are taking before you agree to an MRI. While there are few medicines that would interfere, your doctor should have all available information to make the best decisions about your healthcare.

Then you need to find out exactly why your doctor thinks an MRI is the best choice you have. In essence, an MRI is like a giant magnet. The magnet creates an imaging force, and picture of part of your body appears. A radiologist is able to use this picture to make determinations about what may be wrong with you.

An MRI of one’s brain is one of the most common types of MRI. This image will let your doctor know if you have any growths in your brain and also if the lining and fluid around your brain are the cause of any of your problems.
Another common MRI is of the abdominal cavity. These MRIs may be used to tell if you have any tumors or other growth or if there are any obstructions in your bowels. An abdominal MRI is done when you have problems with your digestive system. If you have other abdominal problems, such as with your reproductive system, then your doctor may consider other types of scans, such as CT scans.

These MRIs are only a couple of the ones that doctors do routinely to help their patients feel better. Getting an MRI is only one step along the way to getting a good diagnosis for your medical problems.

Filed Under: Medical Care Technology Tagged With: Health, Magnetic resonance imaging, Medical Care Technology, X-ray computed tomography

How Medical Physicists Help Cancer Patients

: Image via Wikipedia

One of the most rewarding areas of work in medical physics is the ability to work in cancer research. There are a number of ways that medical physics personnel help fight cancer. The first is the most obvious. Medical physicists work with radiation, and they were first able to determine that radiation and chemotherapy are effective ways to fight a number of cancers.

Now medical physicists work to refine these techniques. They work in research labs to come up with prescription medications that will help fight both cancer and the side effects of many treatments. New chemotherapy, which is simply a drug cocktail, is available now that provides better cancer-fighting drugs that are less likely to cause as many side effects.

Some people who work in medical physics also work to tweak the measures of radiation in the body. Despite the ravages of cancer, there are times when doctors cannot or should not give patients more radiation therapy because of the dangers of doing so. When doctors reach this point has been a bit of a guessing game for awhile, but some medical physicists are now working to come up with new ways to measure radiation in the body. Now doctors have more to go on that a vague notion of how much radiation a person has ingested.

Other work of medical physics for cancer patients includes devising computer programs that will take a large number of variables about a patient into account when determine dosing guidelines. These programs can help ensure that patients get the right amount of drugs every time.

The work of medical physics is integral to the work of fighting and curing cancer. While the work that medical physicists do is less well-known than the work of other medical professionals, their jobs are valuable to helping people and saving lives.

Filed Under: Medical Care Technology Tagged With: Medical Care Technology, Medical physics, Radiation therapy

Could an MRI really rip out my jaw?

Thump, thump, thump, thump.

While the MRI machine continued to thump around me, I tried to calm my frayed nerves. Despite my mother having a strong interest in nuclear medicine, I knew next to nothing about how large, noisy medical equipment worked. In fact, most of my knowledge was gained through medical television dramas where metallic pins and bullet fragments rip through a patient’s muscle as they settle in for… Oh hell! Is my jaw going to rip off!?

When I was a teenager I had braces. I didn’t think they were that bad. Sure, they scratched up the inside of my mouth a bit and flossing became a nearly impossible feat, but I knew in a few years I would have straight teeth and it would all be worth it.

Now I wasn’t so sure. The simple procedure stretched on forever in my mind as visions of the permanent retainer attached to my bottom teeth flung into the machine, my jaw attached to it. Nothing happened, and after I went home I promptly forgot about my ordeal. Well, until a few years later when I watched a television patient have pins rip through her leg when she strolled past an MRI machine.

Wait, so how come my jaw didn’t fly off?

After some quick internet digging I learned three things: I’m not the first person who has ever worried about loosing a jaw during an MRI, bonded dental retainers are generally made from a nonmagnetic nickel alloy, and dental fixtures could still distort the imaging during the procedure.

Now, there are medical implants which make having an MRI very dangerous because of possible damage to the device or the surrounding tissues. And it is important to tell the technician about your past surgeries and procedures so they can properly determine the level of risk. But no, you don’t have to worry about getting a tooth or two lodged into the machine.

Filed Under: Medical Care Technology Tagged With: Magnetic resonance imaging, Medical Care Technology, Medical equipment, Patient