X-Rays in the News

How far can cameras go to make the personal into the public? Pretty far, considering how many news stories I've seen in the past year illustrated with x-rays, MRIs, and medical tomography. The idea of seeing inside the human body is strange enough, without seeing the weird things that can happen inside the body of someone on the other side of the world. Some of the images in this story may be disturbing to some people.

59-year-old Margaret Wegner had a brain scan in Berlin to find the source of her constant headaches. It was a pencil. She had tripped and embedded the pencil in her skull when she was four years old! The bigger part of the pencil was finally removed, but a smaller part was left, as delicate nerves had grown over the 2cm piece.

More curious cases, after the jump.

Gavin Docherty was hit by a nail gun in a workplace accident. His co-worker immediately drove him to the hospital, but they were stopped by Canada's finest on the way for speeding. After seeing nails sticking out of Docherty's forehead, the officer allowed them to continue to the hospital, but followed them so he could issue the driver a $167 ticket for not wearing a seatbelt!

This one isn't exactly an x-ray, but it's a 3D medical image showing how a chair leg went through 19-year-old Shafique el-Fahkri's head during a bar brawl. The Melbourne man survived the incident, and medical intervention saved his eyesight.

Although these images are quite sensational, what struck me about this series of stories was the public nature of these cases. All these were news stories I remembered from the past year or two; I didn't have to search for any of them. Excluding the duck, all but one patient are identified by name, and all are from nations other than the US (with the possible exception of the unidentified patient). In the US, privacy laws allow medical images to be shared with medical personnel, insurance companies, lawyers, law enforcement, and others, but not the press. I don't know what the laws governing such images are in other countries; maybe some of you do. Would you consider allowing pictures of the inside of your body to be published by a news outlet? Or does our concept of privacy only apply to our skin?