Radiologists

"Health is a crown on the heads of the healthy, seen only by the sick" — do you remember that saying we used to read as kids on our school walls, the phrase we always heard from our parents and teachers? We can really appreciate it once we understand the sheer scale of disease in this world. Let me tell you that at this very moment I'm speaking to you, in 2022, there are more than half a billion people on this planet living with heart disease, around 350 million people infected with hepatitis, more than 18 million cases of various types of cancer, and every year strokes affect around 15 million people — and of course there are other diseases affecting millions in countries around the world, but here I'm just giving you a glimpse of some of the most common ones. We wouldn't know anything about all these terrifying numbers if it weren't for the tremendous progress in the world of medicine. Without the advanced medical technologies that exist in our world today, millions of these people wouldn't even know they had these diseases in the first place — even scientists and doctors themselves wouldn't know anything about these deadly diseases, and they would never have been discovered or had treatments invented for them, and they would have been killing people every day without us knowing anything about it at all. When we talk about the medical technology responsible for all of that, we're talking specifically about radiology, or what's called "medical imaging technology," which the world only came to know in the early twentieth century with the discovery of X-rays — which gave doctors the ability to see the organs, cells, and tiny tissues inside the body. Over more than a century, and up to today, different types of medical imaging devices have emerged, such as ultrasound, CT scans, MRI, and others. And since we've reached this point, we should now introduce you to the specialists responsible for everything related to imaging in the medical world: radiologists. The radiologist is responsible for all the medical imaging procedures patients undergo, and they're the only ones able to read and interpret the images produced by the various medical imaging devices, and thereby precisely diagnose the patient's condition and direct them to the appropriate treatment. In the lines ahead, you'll learn more about the nature of their work.

Meet the Writer: Waleed Abo Omiraa