Sonography and Nuclear Medicine are two departments that I am very interested in. Sonography is a high frequency sound wave that produces images on a monitor to view the anatomy of your body. Nuclear Medicine is the branch of medicine that uses radioactive substances in research, diagnostics and treatment. They are both very different from each other, but have some similarities. A difference of the two is the different machines they use and methods to treat and diagnose a patient. One similarity to these fields are that they both are one to one with the patient and you get to know the person a little better as they open up to you and tell you what is going on as they tell you their life stories. Sonography and Ultrasound is the same thing; it just has two names it can go by. In the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, three physicians discovered that sound waves were sent though the body with echoes from different tissues that would form different images of the anatomy of your body. Ultrasound is a sound beam that transfers energy from one point to another like an x-ray beam. These sound waves can only pass through matter and are small vibrations. If there is not matter for the waves to travel through, there is nothing for it to vibrate on and therefore the sound would not exist. There are three components used in Ultrasounds; transducer, the ultrasound beam and an image display on a cathode ray tube or on a screen where the picture is produced. A transducer has two main purposes: Senses the echoes that have returned from the previous pulses to produce the image and it transmits sound in pulses and bursts to create the picture. An ultrasound beam is where light bends and passes through different materials to create an image. A cathode ray tube is a high-vacuum tube in which cathode rays produce an image on a fluorescent screen, used in televisions and computer terminals. Nuclear Medicine was discovered by Marie and Pierre Curie and Henry Becquerel in 1898. This method uses radioactive material that is used for therapeutic and diagnostic treatments. They either inject the material inside of you or it can be in a form of a pharmaceutical which can be combined into a food to digest. Some of the equipment used for these procedures is organ imaging, radioactive analysis and therapeutic uses. These patients do not feel pain when they are getting treated and/or diagnosed and they do not get radioactive exposure as the material is mixed before entering the patient. The prerequisites you need for Nuclear Medicine and Ultrasound are the same. You need specific prerequisites in the healthcare field with a minimum of a two year degree, followed by department specific courses in an accredited program. You can also take department specific training through a trade school, hospital based training program or programs that are on the job clinical training. After the completion of your education you will have to take an ARRT exam and the American Society of Clinical Pathologist Certification. Nuclear Medicine will also require the Nuclear Medicine Technology Certification Board. There are many job opportunities in both of these fields which are in high demand; both are great fields. Some opportunities could be in public health institutions, private hospitals or clinics. During my Community Involvement class, I was exposed to many different aspects of Radiology. In the end I really liked Sonography and Nuclear Medicine best. The thing I liked the most in Sonography was seeing the inside of your body a whole different way than you would in an x-ray. In Nuclear Medicine my favorite part was talking to the patients, listening to what they had to say and seeing how this treatment was painless and easy for them to go through. I feel a career in radiology would be great because each patient would be unique and need to be treated compassionately and have their own story to tell making each day a new experience.
McLarty, Christine. RT 100. spring 2013 ed. Santa Rosa Junior College: Christine Mclarty, 2014. Print.
