The Pros And Cons Of Nuclear Medicine

Introduction

Nuclear medicine at first sounds like something dangerous and should not be used on the human body. However, it is a significant part in the development of medicine. Problems inside the body are going undetected because most of the time they do not have any severe symptoms until it is too late to treat, and x-rays and scanners that use radiation to look through the body are dangerous because they may emit too much radiation on the patient, causing issues in the future. This is where nuclear medicine comes in as a better solution. Over 10,00 of hospitals worldwide use radioisotopes in medicine, and around 90% of the procedures are for diagnosis. The most common radioisotope in nuclear medicine used for diagnosis is technetium-99, with about 40-45 million procedures per year, accounting for 80% of all nuclear medicine procedures worldwide. This essay will focus the positives and negatives of using nuclear medicine in medicine, and how it has impacted the world. Nuclear medicine is the use of radioactive substances in diagnostic and therapeutic procedures,

Using radioisotopes to detect various abnormalities in the body is dangerous as too much exposure inside the body could lead to numerous side effects and long lasting issues. That is why nuclear medicine uses specific radioisotopes to scope the body and detect complications inside the body; all of the radioisotopes used have very short periods of radioactivity. 99mTc has a half life of 6 hours, meaning that after it emits the gamma rays or internal conversion electrons (a radioactive decaying process where a stimulated nucleus interacts electromagnetically with one of the orbital electrons), the isotope will return to their ground state and won’t emit radiation anymore. The body cannot handle too much radiation, so radioisotopes that return to their ground state after a short time are good to use without creating