[HN Gopher] Man wearing metallic necklace dies after being sucke...
___________________________________________________________________
Man wearing metallic necklace dies after being sucked into MRI
machine
Author : brudgers
Score : 137 points
Date : 2025-07-21 00:40 UTC (22 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.com)
| jleyank wrote:
| Y'know, sometimes people saying you can't do certain things isn't
| them just being an asshole. Physics and biology really doesn't
| care what people think...
| Mistletoe wrote:
| > She said he was wearing a 20lb (9kg) chain with a lock that he
| used for weight training.
|
| Um, ok.
| csours wrote:
| Google Street view of the facility:
|
| https://maps.app.goo.gl/6ssyJfjVn1fUGaG2A
| emptyroads wrote:
| I was wondering "why would the street view be relevant?"
|
| Turns out, it's pretty relevant to the situation - especially
| how the unauthorized access was possible.
|
| This wasn't your typical hospital MRI. This is basically your
| local tanning salon that somehow acquired an MRI machine.
| jpgvm wrote:
| I wasn't going to click that link but now I have and honestly
| - that is mildly terrifying.
|
| I don't understand how such a dangerous machine can end up in
| a place that looks like that.
| its-summertime wrote:
| That size of building is relatively normal for a non-hospital
| MRI facility.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| What we are learning is that "non hospital" medical
| facilities suck.
|
| I can tell you that I don't trust you as a doctor unless
| you are physically located in a hospital, preferably the
| larger the better.
|
| If I have an appendicitis on the way to my normal
| procedure, I want to be within less than 100M of an
| emergency room already.
|
| Small scale/small time medical offices were a mistake and
| I'll never change my mind.
| kccqzy wrote:
| Agreed. It's also for patient convenience. More than once
| I was at a small medical office and was told that the
| doctor had prescribed a certain diagnostic test for which
| the facility didn't have the equipment for. So I make an
| appointment at a real hospital, and then make a follow-up
| appointment at the small medical office for reviewing the
| results. It's tiring.
| ars wrote:
| You would have to do that anyway. Just because you are
| physically located in the hospital for your checkup does
| not mean there is magically some availability for this
| procedure.
|
| They would schedule you, and you come back.
| rafram wrote:
| That just doesn't make sense to me. If I'm going for a
| regular checkup or a non-surgical appointment, there's
| absolutely no reason that I need my doctor's office to be
| within a hospital complex. Sure, I could have an
| emergency on the way to my non-emergency appointment, but
| I could also have an emergency on the way to the grocery
| store or the gym or the park, and I don't demand that
| those facilities _also_ be built within a hospital.
| ars wrote:
| > What we are learning is that "non hospital" medical
| facilities suck.
|
| That's really not true, just because you have one bad
| example does not mean they all are. In general the non-
| hospital facilities just do one thing, and they do it
| very very well.
|
| > I can tell you that I don't trust you as a doctor
| unless you are physically located in a hospital,
| preferably the larger the better.
|
| That's terrible!! Really. Putting the doctor in a
| hospital makes him a hospital employee usually, you are
| asking for the end of private practice for Doctors, you
| are asking for the end of personal relationships with
| doctors.
| voidUpdate wrote:
| If it weren't so dangerous, I'd love to pop along to my local
| tanning salon and get an MRI scan. I've always been quite
| interested to see an MRI of my brain. Alas, I'm stuck with
| waiting for some kind of medical testing to need some test
| subjects to scan, or a university student needing someone to
| learn to use an MRI on. Or I guess have a head injury serious
| enough to need an MRI, but that's less desirable
| harvey9 wrote:
| It isn't dangerous as long as you follow the safety
| protocol. This guy was very unlucky as he was wearing a
| weight training device made of metal, not just a watch or
| earring.
| voidUpdate wrote:
| I would prefer to have a trained professional operating
| my MRI scanner as opposed to someone who read the manual
| for 10 mins
| hansvm wrote:
| That's mostly true, but we're still finding new and
| interesting ways MRIs can kill people. E.g., non-magnetic
| metals are often safe, bit there was that guy who had his
| brain cooked as a spinal implant was the wrong length and
| focused the RF energy into his head. The additional
| protocol we developed is that objects can be certified
| safe for specific MRIs but not for all of them (and that
| being certified safe for a bigger machine doesn't say
| anything about safety in the presence of smaller
| machines).
|
| Yes, they're pretty safe nowadays, but there's a lot of
| energy that gets dumped into a human body during an MRI,
| and I'd bet my last nickel that we haven't found every
| way that can cause problems.
| m_j_g wrote:
| In Poland you can get one without doctors referal (for CT
| you need one because of ionizing radiation exposure), it
| cost between 100-200$ in normal, reputable hospital (not
| one like from the street view).
| poulpy123 wrote:
| Nice to be on a country where these facilities are not
| overwhelmed
| barbazoo wrote:
| Which I wouldn't assume based on an HN post.
| ars wrote:
| Other way around, you are paying money to go to the head
| of the line, while the people with medical issues get it
| for free - but have to wait.
| voidUpdate wrote:
| Sadly that's a little too far for me to pop over for a
| day
| JackFr wrote:
| You can volunteer for a study. Check for flyers at your
| hospital asking for volunteers. (Especially psychiatric
| institutions - they love brain MRIs for their research.)
| voidUpdate wrote:
| Yeah, hopefully someone will want to do a study on
| autism, adhd, trans women or all of the above
| kube-system wrote:
| There are providers that cater to the "I just want to know"
| market: https://prenuvo.com/
| alnwlsn wrote:
| I've seen many people make 3D prints of their own brain.
|
| Once, I heard a story where some company was trying to get
| MRI test participants, and if you agreed they offered to
| print your brain for you as one of the perks.
|
| Turns out, they gave everyone the same brain, like they
| would just always use the same file when 3D printing it.
| Probably had a box of pre-printed ones in the back.
| Dishonest, but I guess how would you ever find out?
| ahartmetz wrote:
| "Open MRI" - how appropriate. Too open MRI even.
| poulpy123 wrote:
| I have only been to MRI in hospitals but it looks shady as fuck
| nancyminusone wrote:
| I wonder if you could take a walk around that building and see
| a compass needle move.
| avalys wrote:
| It's notable that he was not the patient, he was the patient's
| husband who somehow was allowed to enter the room with the MRI
| machine.
|
| The superconducting magnet in an MRI scanner is always on even
| when not performing a scan.
|
| This was pure and simple negligence by the MRI operators. Access
| control is the most basic part of MRI safety!
|
| Even if he was not wearing this "chain", he never should have
| been allowed to enter the room. He could've been wearing a steel
| wristwatch, had a keyring in his pocket, etc.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Technically he entered "without permission" but at the urging
| of the patient. Still negligence, though more understable. I
| wonder if a metal detector that prevents opening the door would
| help? Perhaps with a big, scary red override button for
| emergencies?
| WillAdams wrote:
| There is (at least according to one episode of _Grey's
| Anatomy_) a big scary red button to shut down the machine in
| an emergency, resulting in expensive to restore operation:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/m9algh/e.
| ..
|
| According to the above post, it's a venting of the liquid
| helium, which requires ~$25,000 to replace).
| 9dev wrote:
| We're talking about a human life here. _Fuck_ the balance
| and vent immediately!
| egberts1 wrote:
| Again, it isn't an instant-off button.
|
| Only good for removal of any metal-adorn victims and
| unintended metallic objects ...
| potato3732842 wrote:
| The dude suffocated. You don't need anything near
| "instant" to prevent that.
|
| Edit: Since apparently some people need reminding, per
| the article he had time to say goodbye to his wife before
| he lost consciousness, this wasn't some liveleak skull
| splat type thing.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| Do you have a source for that? The BBC just says "a
| medical episode" of which he died later.
| JackFr wrote:
| Multiple heart attacks.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| That I can well believe!
| Filligree wrote:
| He was wearing a twenty pound necklace. In a magnetic
| field that strong? His throat was crushed, likely
| instantly.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| The chain apparently caused him to be hurled across the
| room. We don't know how he died, but given the inverse
| square law, the possibilities are quite grisly.
| shigawire wrote:
| There is some consideration for other patients who may
| die due to not getting an MRI in the meantime
| Hikikomori wrote:
| They gonna to get an MRI while the guys corpse is stuck
| to the machine?
| swat535 wrote:
| I'm not sure: "apologies, it was too expensive to turn it
| off, better luck next time" is a valid justification nor is
| it a solution.
| al_borland wrote:
| It seems like there could be a double door situation. Go
| through the first door, close it. The room detects metal, and
| only unlocks the door to the MRI if the other door is closed
| and no metal is in the room.
|
| I'm not sure what kind of emergency would warrant allowing
| metal to pass through when metal is detected, if there is a
| risk of death for using it.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| > I'm not sure what kind of emergency would warrant
| allowing metal to pass through when metal is detected, if
| there is a risk of death for using it.
|
| The risk would be in the false positive during an emergency
| situation.
| solid_fuel wrote:
| A false negative is also dangerous, if the magnet hasn't
| been quenched. In a case like this, trying to use metal
| bolt cutters to cut off a necklace or something is just
| going to compound the disaster if the magnet is still
| active.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| "The room detects metal" is a massive cost compared to
| just, you know, doing what the operators tell you to do,
| which works in 99.99999% of the cases.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| Not sure why it would have to be a massive cost? Wouldn't
| even need to be a room, a door like metal detector used
| normal security settings with its sensitivity turned up.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| Now make it medical grade and it costs an insane amount.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| i.e. we can't fix a dysfunction in X because of
| dysfunction in Y.
| alternatex wrote:
| I thought in this story the operator did let the person
| in, which if so was a grave mistake that they now have to
| carry with them. Though I wonder how you think an
| operator would know if people have metal on them?
| Definitely not by trusting people to decide/judge by
| themselves I hope?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| The policy should be no one but the patient and staff is
| allowed in, the prep for the patient prior to procedure
| (both in advance and immediately prior) should cover
| them, and staff should be adequately trained.
|
| There should be no need to evaluate random other people
| because they simply should not be allowed in at all.
| lostlogin wrote:
| A lot of patients and staff have small metal items that
| aren't ferrous and it is fine. Many implants, lots of
| clothing (bra, jeans) and jewellery. You just have to be
| careful. I'm an MR tech.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| Tech: "ok we're done here"
|
| Wide: "honey can you come in here and help me since I don't
| have my walker"
|
| <dude walks right in and gets dead>
|
| Not hard to imagine something like that happening too fast to
| be stopped, especially if staff is distracted by the
| transition from running an MRI to getting the patient in/out.
| onemoresoop wrote:
| Nobody should have permission and be kept away at all times
| by staff. They'd probably follow rules for a while now.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| > "I'm saying, 'Could you turn off the machine? Call 911. Do
| something. Turn this damn thing off!'" [pleaded the victim's
| wife].
|
| The journalist missed a golden opportunity for education here:
| most MRI scanner magnets cannot be turned off like that. For
| the few that can, it's going to cost >$50,000 just to refill
| the liquid helium, not to mention the real and opportunity
| costs associated with rendering the machine offline for days or
| weeks.
|
| If people don't know about the magnet, or don't know that it
| can't be turned off (or perhaps assume it's "off" because the
| scan was over, as I would guess happened here), accidents
| happen.
| josephcsible wrote:
| > most MRI scanner magnets cannot be turned off like that.
| For the few that can, it's going to cost >$50,000 just to
| refill the liquid helium, not to mention the real and
| opportunity costs associated with rendering the machine
| offline for days or weeks.
|
| I thought these days, most MRIs _did_ have an emergency
| quench button.
| jpgvm wrote:
| Yeah I would say all modern MRIs do. However one
| misconception is that loss of field strength is
| instantanous, it's not. The field strength drops off over
| about 15s or so as the helium boils off and the magnet
| losses superconducting properties.
|
| So the emergency quench is less useful than it sounds in
| these situations... it's very likely if an MRI is going to
| kill you it's going to do it fast enough for it not to be
| relevant.
| Doxin wrote:
| Surely you'd hit the quench button straight away? I
| cannot imagine policy being "check if the victim is dead,
| and if not hit the button."
|
| I also wonder what the field decay is like. If it takes
| 15s and it's linear it's much worse than if it's 15s but
| decays exponentially. You don't need to field to be gone,
| you need the field to diminish enough to stop strangling
| the poor guy.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| Takes more than 15sec to strangle someone. 30 shouldn't
| cause any serious damage beyond whatever mechanical
| damage there is from being tugged around. Heck, 2-3min is
| probably fine if the MRI is located at a hospital.
|
| Edit: Per the article that I would like to remind
| everyone is well worth reading, he had time to say
| goodbye to his wife, that would seem to me to imply he
| wasn't tossed hard enough to be incapacitated.
| baq wrote:
| strangle? dude's neck was probably crushed. if I had to
| guess this was a near decapitation, not a strangling.
| Doxin wrote:
| honestly, probably, yeah, but the guy running the MRI
| can't know that and should have quenched immediately. You
| don't just go "oh well he's probably dead, nothing I can
| do about it now."
| baq wrote:
| my point is even if he had quenched ASAP the damage
| might've been done already.
| close04 wrote:
| Causing severe head trauma or crushing the trachea can be
| almost instant. A lot of the more serious MRI related
| injuries are objects flying across the room and hitting
| someone, especially over the head.
| strken wrote:
| Per the article, _his wife claims_ that he had time to
| _wave_ goodbye to her.
|
| A man getting dragged by the neck and hitting an MRI
| machine head-first is going to make all sorts of hand
| movements that his grieving widow might interpret as
| waving goodbye in hindsight.
| zdragnar wrote:
| In this case, he died after being removed from the
| machine and taken to a hospital.
|
| The damage was likely done almost immediately; a heavy 20
| pound "necklace" is going to apply a lot of crushing
| force.
| Filligree wrote:
| And for the other readers: It wouldn't be applying twenty
| pounds of force, it would be applying...
|
| My rule of thumb calculation came to 3,000 lbf, which
| seems like a lot, but perhaps that's actually accurate.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| Seems spot on to me.
|
| Figure half that to start since most of the loop is gonna
| wind up laying flat and only the half of it is prevented
| from doing so by one's neck. Then maybe cut it by 2/3
| again since the sides aren't gonna do a ton of direct
| squishing. That still leaves you with hundreds of pounds,
| which roughly aligns with the timeline of suffocation in
| the article High hundreds low thousand likely would be
| neck snapping or otherwise instantly incapacitating.
| Doxin wrote:
| > The damage was likely done almost immediately;
|
| Not disagreeing, just saying the tech running the machine
| _couldn 't have known that_ and _should_ have quenched
| the machine in case the damage was survivable.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Apparently he was lucid and speaking for some time before
| he passed out.
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| You're in luck. Video of an MRI magnet being quenched
| that I posted above:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SOUJP5dFEg
| jpgvm wrote:
| Yeah so this video shows exactly what I am talking about,
| the chair and other objects don't fall immediately, it
| takes ~15s for them to drop to the ground after the
| quench starts.
| lostlogin wrote:
| After GE got their shit together, yes.
| https://www.diagnosticimaging.com/view/everything-you-
| need-k...
| daft_pink wrote:
| I'm pretty sure when some guy gets sucked into the machine,
| the downtimes/lawsuits/etc and pressing the emergency button
| and having a ton of down time is a sunk cost at that point
| and you are basically obligated to do everytyhing you can to
| avoid catastrophe to reduce your legal peril.
| sapiogram wrote:
| > For the few that can, it's going to cost >$50,000 just to
| refill the liquid helium
|
| In this case, they were going to have to do that anyway.
| Might as well shut it down right away.
| Insanity wrote:
| Fair, but these are split-second decisions and they likely
| didn't have a lot of time to react.
| Aurornis wrote:
| An emergency quench of the magnet takes about 1-2 minutes.
|
| There isn't a way to instantly turn it off.
| cvoss wrote:
| All the more reason to push the button immediately.
| mdavid626 wrote:
| Isn't 2 minutes enough?
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| Does that energy basically turn into heat because the
| superconductors start to have electrical resistance?
|
| If so, I'm curious if that heat causes additional damage
| to the machine, necessitating a refurbishing or at least
| some parts replacement.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| > most MRI scanner magnets cannot be turned off like that.
| For the few that can, it's going to cost >$50,000 just to
| refill the liquid helium,
|
| I now nothing about MDI so please tell me: why does it need
| to refuel the helium? Aren't the magnets "just"
| superconductive electromagnets? Why can't the current
| powering the magnet be stopped?
|
| Edit: thanks everyone for your explanations, I appreciate it.
| BenjiWiebe wrote:
| If it's a loop of superconducting material, which seems
| likely as that's how you prevent losses, then you don't
| have to supply current so there's no current to stop
| supplying.
| KingMob wrote:
| They require extremely low cooling from the helium to
| achieve superconductivity.
|
| And with superconductivity, by definition, current flows
| without resistance; it continues even without energy, so
| turning off the power won't stop it. Nor will it heat up
| and decay from resistance. Modern MRIs are well-insulated
| enough to maintain their field without power from days to
| weeks.
|
| The only thing that collapses the field is to warm it up to
| where superconductivity stops, which can be done slow and
| expensively, or in an emergency, fast and even _more_
| expensively.
|
| By venting the supercooled gases in what's called a quench,
| you can turn it off faster, but the time it needs can
| depend on the model. It could be 20 seconds, or it could be
| 2 minutes, which, depending on the emergency, may be
| insufficient.
|
| A quench itself can be dangerous, though usually less so
| than a patient pinned to the magnet. There's a chance that
| poor ventilation can flood the room with helium, causing
| loss of consciousness in seconds. The increase in pressure
| can also make it impossible to escape if the door's not
| built for that. You'd have to break a window. On top of
| which, it's dangerously cold, and the explosive bang can
| rupture your eardrums.
| anonymars wrote:
| From Wikipedia:
|
| "Any change to the current through the magnet must be done
| very slowly, first because electrically the magnet is a
| large inductor and an abrupt current change will result in
| a large voltage spike across the windings, and more
| importantly because fast changes in current can cause eddy
| currents and mechanical stresses in the windings that can
| precipitate a quench [...]. So the power supply is usually
| microprocessor-controlled, programmed to accomplish current
| changes gradually, in gentle ramps. It usually takes
| several minutes to energize or de-energize a laboratory-
| sized magnet."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_magnet
| mNovak wrote:
| You actually don't need to actively supply current -- it
| just keeps going round and round, and you can't "short" it
| out because the path of least resistance will always be the
| superconducting winding.
|
| You also can't open a switch to stop the current because
| it's basically a giant inductor, it really wants to keep
| the magnetic field (and current) constant. Meaning if you
| suddenly disconnected the winding, it would arc across the
| gap (continuously, for quite a while until the stored
| energy was spent).
|
| So what they do is vent/boil off the liquid helium which is
| keeping the magnet cold, such that it's no longer
| superconducting and the current will die off. You can't
| reclaim the helium, hence you need a fresh refill to chill
| down the magnet again.
| Symmetry wrote:
| In the US the federal government uses numbers around $10
| million for the statistical value of a human life when doing
| cost benefit analysis for various programs or interventions.
| Any sort of lifesaving medical care can easily come in at
| more than $50,000. The operators shouldn't be hesitating to
| shut down that machine to save someone's life, and I would be
| willing to be that they are trained to do so.
| elaus wrote:
| Now you are at the Trolley problem: shut down the machine
| to (maybe) save one person, but preventing all MRIs for the
| next x weeks, causing y indirect deaths?
| ashtonbaker wrote:
| It'll need to be shut down anyway to pull the giant metal
| chain out. You might as well do it right away. Patients
| can and will be rescheduled to other MRI facilities.
| swat535 wrote:
| I'm not sure how this is a Trolley problem?
|
| It's a logistics and legislation problem. Hospitals need
| to be adequately prepared for emergencies and handle
| backups.
|
| I think a death machine that can't be stopped is an
| issue.
| cvoss wrote:
| The Trolley problem is only a problem because there is
| perfect information in the hypothetical about the
| consequences of your actions. In real life, you have far
| less information to go on, which often leads to a more
| obvious right answer. Shutting down the machine to try to
| save the one person right in front of you that you know
| is in immediate danger is the right answer, versus the
| far less knowable hypothetical future where some number
| of people may or may not have delayed or relocated scans
| which may or may not have delayed treatment that may or
| may not have been immediately necessary as a life-saving
| matter. As a private MRI operator, you are not morally
| responsible for keeping your machine functional in order
| to help keep (figurative) passers-by alive. But you are
| morally responsible for the health and safety of the
| patients and visitors on your premises.
| chrisandchris wrote:
| > The journalist missed a golden opportunity for education
| here: most MRI scanner magnets cannot be turned off like
| that.
|
| Thanks for that - and it reminded me of the sad state media
| is today. I read the same story in about 4 papers and nowhere
| was written _why_ they couldn't turn off the machine.
|
| Miss the days where journalists actually read what they have
| written.
| hn_user82179 wrote:
| That's a huge deal. I read the article and assumed the
| machine was mistakenly thought to be turned off or was
| "winding down". That's especially frustrating as the patient
| seems to be blaming the hospital staff for the incident.
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| If anyone is curious what pushing the button to turn off (AKA
| "quench) the magnet looks like, there's this video of an MRI
| machine being decommissioned:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SOUJP5dFEg
|
| You push the button, then 15 seconds later the liquid helium
| is vented through a pipe on the roof of the hospital (it's
| quite a spectacular display), and then the superconductor
| starts to heat up and no longer be a superconductor so the
| current that's been flowing through the coils (they are
| energized once, when the machine is first installed, and then
| continue flowing forever so long as the superconductor is
| superconducting since there's no resistance) and the magnetic
| field decays to nothing.
|
| It's not an instantaneous process.
| Aurornis wrote:
| The cost isn't the issue.
|
| Quenching the magnet takes up to several minutes. There are
| also alarms to warn people to get away because the rapidly
| expanding helium could displace oxygen in the room.
|
| It's not about the cost. If there's an emergency that
| necessitates pressing the button they'll be pressing it as
| soon as someone can reach it. It still takes time for the
| magnetic field to dissipate.
| rzzzt wrote:
| What sort of decay curve can you plot from the magnetic
| field dissipating over time? Is it linear?
| lostlogin wrote:
| They can be quenched (as you note), but there was that one
| time that GE didn't connect the quench button to prevent
| accidental/expensive usage and n India, and someone died.
|
| Surprise! It turns out there is a reason it should be
| connected.
|
| https://www.diagnosticimaging.com/view/everything-you-
| need-k...
| DanielleMolloy wrote:
| MRI techs do not think about it cost when life is at danger.
| If someone is in life danger due to the magnet, you quench.
| This is standard MRI education.
|
| I think the big question here is why they didn't..
| pxtail wrote:
| > The superconducting magnet in an MRI scanner is always on
| even when not performing a scan.
|
| This should be placed on the entrance with big bold letters, I
| think that a lot of accidents could be avoided by simply
| providing "WHY" information. I had MRI scan and I wasn't aware
| that machine was active even when not performing scan and now
| after knowing that I think that personnel there was very lax
| with allowing me to enter the room after instructing me to put
| metal objects away AND without enough emphasis how dangerous it
| could be if I forgot to do so.
| nancyminusone wrote:
| They do. You'll be hard pressed to find a magnet room without
| this [0] sign on the door. That said, it's probably not that
| warning to most people. Fridge magnets are always on too.
|
| 0 - https://www.zzmedical.com/exclusives/mri-warning-wall-
| sign-m...
| jlokier wrote:
| I tried to look. "Access Denied - Sucuri Website Firewall"
| ryandvm wrote:
| How hard is it to gate the patient entrance to the MRI with a
| big-ass metal detector turned up to 11? Why is this still a
| problem?
| scarier wrote:
| This is already a common practice. One of the issues with the
| standard implementation is that it's set up as an
| administrative control rather than an engineering control
| (which would be significantly more difficult/expensive/space-
| consuming). At least one other comment thread has discussed
| the airlock implementation that I'm sure a very large number
| of people have independently thought of.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Or gate it, period - nobody should get in that easily.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| I wonder if that's a problem in case a medical intervention
| is required.
| whatevaa wrote:
| It is.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| There are locked doors with badges pretty much everywhere
| in a hospital in my country though (including the door
| leading to the ER, and the escalator which goes from the
| ER to the ICU, in my city's hospital), so I don't really
| understand what would prevent to put such a door at the
| entrance of the MRI room.
| bluGill wrote:
| Also how they have to get people in. One of my MRIs was
| hours after surgery - I was wheeled in on a stretcher
| while attached to IV and other machines. They slid me on
| and off the machine since I wasn't allowed to move myself
| (I'm not sure if I could have what with the drugs still
| in my system. take my story with some salt: because of
| the drugs I wouldn't trust my own memory of the event).
| Which is to say they need a lot of space around these
| machines and the doors/gates would need to be very big to
| fit all the people involved through.
| sfn42 wrote:
| The emergency personnel still needs to be controlled to
| make sure they aren't carrying magnetic stuff.
| browningstreet wrote:
| I recently had an MRI in one of those full-body MRI
| machines.. and we went through two locked doors and they used
| a wand on me (like they have at airports) to scan my body,
| even after I answered that I had no metal anywhere in my
| body. There were 3 operators/nurses in the inner ring of all
| this, operating machines.. securing my limbs, etc.
|
| So at least in some places, this is the SOP.
| supportengineer wrote:
| What if people used their eyeballs and their common sense?
| Everyone failed here.
| lostlogin wrote:
| MRI operator here: the false alarms from all the metal that's
| fine are an issue. Most people have some in/on them and it's
| usually fine.
| int_19h wrote:
| Given the rather spectacular failure mode, isn't this
| rather a case of "better safe than sorry"? i.e. even if
| it's technically safe, why not require people to remove
| everything that triggers the detector just to be sure?
| lostlogin wrote:
| You'd be surprised what people won't do.
|
| Unlike many facilities, we insist everyone strips down to
| underpants (no bra) and wears a gown. We push quite hard
| to remove all jewellery (including piercings), but many
| places do not. It removes a whole category of problems,
| but is also slow, has an extra cost (laundry) and still
| patients leave things on, covered up by the gown.
|
| But the percentage of people with something in them is
| very very high.
|
| We are dealing with a population that by definition has
| health issues, and I'd estimate that 75%+ have something
| metal in them.
|
| Sternal wires, fillings, clips, biopsy markers, screws,
| plates, braces, joint replacements (x6), ports, mesh,
| vascular stent, urinary stents, breast implants. These
| are conditionally safe implants from yesterday. If we
| expanded it to a week we could add heart valves, hearing
| implants, vsd closure devices and about 20 other implants
| I'm sure.
|
| We have either memorised or looked up the conditions for
| each. We pay techs well because we want good staff.
| Minimum staffing levels include using healthcare
| assistants and suchlike. There are potential downsides to
| this approach, particularly around safety.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| The average MRI operator isn't going to start wrestling with a
| dude with a 20 pound metal chain around his neck.
|
| They'll try to talk sense into you, but they're not security
| guards nor trained in close combat.
|
| Nor are the doors locked or secured, they kinda assume that
| people don't just rush in and do as they're told.
| codyb wrote:
| Is there any indication this man was aggressively trying to
| enter the room before the technician eventually let him in?
| The article just says his wife called out to him, then the
| tech let him in and that's it.
| MisterTea wrote:
| I am willing to bet a lot of money he was going into that room
| no matter how many times he was told not to or how many signs
| were posted. Some people have an extreme contempt for authority
| and will stubbornly ignore direction. Sometimes,bad things
| happen to them.
| kylecazar wrote:
| Nobody should be able to get into that room that isn't supposed
| to be there.
|
| Also, twenty pound necklace?
|
| "She said he was wearing a 20lb (9kg) chain with a lock that he
| used for weight training."
| atmavatar wrote:
| In addition to that:
|
| > She said she had called him into the room after she had a
| scan on Wednesday.
|
| Part of me wonders why the wife felt empowered to invite her
| husband, who she knew was wearing a giant metal necklace, into
| the MRI room after her scan. The hospital would have been very
| clear with her about the dangers of wearing any metal in the
| room even when the scanner was not running _especially_ because
| it 's common for women to wear jewelry containing various
| metals and alloys.
|
| Presumably, the husband would have been part of those
| conversations as well, and thus, should have refrained from
| joining her in the room anyway, so he isn't completely absolved
| of responsibility.
|
| It seems there's plenty of blame to go around.
| arp242 wrote:
| Just force of habit. Being around such forceful magnets is
| not a daily occurrence so you don't really think about this
| sort of thing (for both the wife and husband). I can totally
| see how something like this happens.
|
| I once bought a can of coke and put it in my backpack, then I
| forgot about it. At the airport a few hours later I went
| through security and didn't think about it at all. No idea
| why my bag was selected for a manual check. Until he pulled
| out the soda can. Big (but harmless) do'h moment. People's
| brains and memories are just wonky like that sometimes; most
| people have a few "I'm an idiot" anecdotes like that. Even
| with training by the way: which is why checklists exists for
| safety critical stuff. "They have been warned about MRI
| dangers" is pretty meaningless.
|
| The failure is 100% on the facility for not properly
| controlling access to the MRI room, and people can just walk
| in apparently(?) And no, a sign or some briefing doesn't cut
| it.
|
| This is also a risk for absent-minded staff by the way: I
| don't think I'm the only person who has walked in the wrong
| room by accident. Or just a small confusion about whether the
| MRI is operational. Things like that.
| mhdhn wrote:
| I just got an MRI. No warning about dangers of having any
| metal in the room was mentioned verbally. Was asked if I had
| any metal in my body, not told why. I just said no to that
| question. That was it.
| zigzag312 wrote:
| > she was getting an MRI on her knee and asked her husband to
| come in to help her get up afterwards
| pasttense01 wrote:
| The people getting MRIs are sicker than the general
| population so the facility should have people available to
| help getting people up after being scanned.
| poulpy123 wrote:
| Most people included myself don't realize the risks of a MRI
| jvanderbot wrote:
| You say "hospital" but this was basically an amateur run MRI
| salon as far as I can tell.
| zahlman wrote:
| > The hospital would have been very clear with her about the
| dangers of wearing any metal in the room even when the
| scanner was not running _especially_ because it 's common for
| women to wear jewelry containing various metals and alloys.
|
| It was not in a hospital:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44630969
| theshrike79 wrote:
| A dude wearing a 9kg necklace is not usually someone the
| average MRI tech can prevent from going anywhere if stern words
| won't do.
| odyssey7 wrote:
| It's wild that the bottleneck keeping us from buying more MRI
| machines, achieving economies of scale for a no-radiation way of
| viewing soft tissues in high resolution, is supposedly the
| specialized technicians, and here we had a technician who
| couldn't manage to turn it off in time when something went wrong,
| and apparently didn't keep metal objects out of the room. (We use
| metal detectors any time you walk into a sporting event, why not
| an MRI room?)
|
| I expect this story to be promoted by people who benefit from
| sales of x-ray / CT machines though. MRIs and all of their
| promise for public health could continue to be set back.
| andy99 wrote:
| You can't turn it off, it's a static magnet with hundreds of
| amps flowing in a closed loop in a giant superconducting coil.
| The usual comparison is that a charged magnet has the same
| kinetic energy as a loaded 747 coming in to land. To "turn it
| off" you can bring it above superconducting temp, dissipate all
| that power as heat, and boil off thousands of liters of helium
| (fun fact, they usually have ducts to outside for this so
| everyone doesn't suffocate during a quench). Which might have
| happened in this case due to physical damage to the magnet, but
| is not as easy as flicking a switch and having it be "off".
| odyssey7 wrote:
| Okay, this sounds more serious than I thought. But then, why
| was someone able to walk into that room with metal around
| their neck if it was clearly so life-threatening?
|
| Anyway, I'm complaining as someone who personally has turned
| down recommended medical procedures after checking radiation
| cancer risk numbers and realizing the radiation risk was
| being downplayed. When I saw the numbers, to me the cancer
| risk wasn't worth it, so I went without a solution to my
| health problem. Had an MRI been an option, I would have more
| likely said yes.
| jpgvm wrote:
| > But then, why was someone able to walk into that room
| with metal around their neck if it was clearly so life-
| threatening?
|
| Take a look at the Google Street View link someone posted.
| It's pretty clear this facility -shouldn't- have been able
| to acquire an MRI machine in the first place.
|
| It also elucidates how such an accident could happen, i.e
| they clearly don't have the trained staff and protocols
| necessary given the danger of an MRI machine. It's very
| likely the poor gentleman didn't understand the immense
| danger the machine poses.
|
| They are expensive and rare for a reason IMO. Yes it would
| be great to have more of them but the best place for more
| of them is within proper hospitals and leveraging economies
| of scale to share technicians across a fleet of them in a
| well run facility.
| baggy_trough wrote:
| Can you explain why your assertions are clear from the
| Google Street View? They don't seem to follow for me.
| andy99 wrote:
| > But then, why was someone able to walk into that room
| with metal around their neck if it was clearly so life-
| threatening?
|
| They shouldn't have been, it's a major failure of access
| control.
| ta20240528 wrote:
| You got the MRI magnet dissipation-time completely wrong,
| but it hasn't influenced your opinion on the radiation risk
| in other similarly sophisticated equipment that could save
| your life?
|
| Astonishing.
| odyssey7 wrote:
| A hasty incorrect assumption that I revised on new
| information is obviously not the same as hard data on
| radiation doses and cancer implications considered over
| weeks.
|
| The "could save my life" odds were not very clear and the
| risk of cancer for that radiation dose had been long ago
| quantified by scientists, though without considering the
| immunosuppressants I was taking at the time that elevate
| cancer risks, making those rates more of a best-case
| scenario than something to count on. Above all else, the
| number known to the healthcare facility was the dollar
| amount to bill to my insurance, with the facility
| receiving nothing but money in exchange for taking those
| risks with patients' lives.
|
| For reference, in exchange for 10 mSv of radiation, a
| moderate dosage for a CT scan, the cancer risk for a
| young adult is something like 1/1000 over the course of
| their life. This means that out of every 1000 young
| adults who receive a 10 mSv CT scan, 1 would go on to get
| cancer they otherwise would not have gotten, assuming
| those 1000 aren't already at higher risk of dying sooner
| (this assumption is important to weigh but is not
| straightforward). Those odds sound low, but if there was
| a revolver with 1000 chambers and one bullet, would you
| play Russian roulette with that if your life wasn't on
| the line? The risk of cancer for the same radiation dose
| is much higher for children.
|
| A technically clear answer to this is to use MRIs
| wherever practical, and to make MRIs more practical as
| much as we can. Why accept 10 mSv of radiation when you
| could just do an MRI instead? We should be making MRIs
| more and more practical. I'm concerned about the
| potential fear-mongering over times like this one when
| the facility fails to perform an MRI safely, where the
| impression people get could be that MRIs are dangerous,
| when the hazard was really the facility doing a bad job.
| By contrast, a perfectly performed CT scan will deliver a
| known radiation dose to the patient every time.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| > The usual comparison is that a charged magnet has the same
| kinetic energy as a loaded 747 coming in to land
|
| So once you divide by the "lying to people allegedly for
| their own good and trading away credibility in the process"
| factor what does that come out to? A semi truck at highway
| speeds? Those can stop in under 10sec.
| c22 wrote:
| If you get hit by a semi truck at highway speeds it could
| stop one second later and you'd still be in pretty rough
| shape.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| It isn't a binary like that with the MRI though. If it
| stops strangling you in 10sec you're great, 15 you're
| fine, 20 you need to be woken back up.
|
| Edit: Per the article that you have all supposedly read,
| he wasn't instantly incapacitated. He was pinned
| onto/into the machine with enough weight on him that he
| suffocated over seconds and ultimately died at the
| hospital. This would have been a "close call" with an
| E-stop (which they likely had, just wasn't hit soon
| enough).
| c22 wrote:
| I don't know, I imagine getting suddenly jerked across
| the room by your neck is not a slow and gentle
| strangulation event. In addition, as I understand it,
| currents can be induced in metal objects causing them to
| heat up. So no, I'm not sure that 15 seconds of violent
| burning strangulation of an elderly individual is _fine_.
| It 's not clear this fellow died from strangulation.
| Filligree wrote:
| That necklace would have been stuck to the magnet with a
| force around 3,000 pounds.
|
| Strangulation is one thing, but his throat was crushed;
| there's no way around it. That's not survivable no matter
| how quickly you're released.
| redwall_hp wrote:
| A magnet yanking a chain around your neck isn't going to
| slowly suffocate you either. It's going to instantly crush
| your trachea and maybe your spinal chord, like a drop from a
| hanging.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| The facts as reported in the article indicate that he was
| able to say goodbye before being suffocated. I wouldn't
| call that "instantly crush your trachea and maybe your
| spinal chord".
| grues-dinner wrote:
| > The usual comparison is that a charged magnet has the same
| kinetic energy as a loaded 747 coming in to land.
|
| That sounds like it a bit of an overstatement. 200 tonnes of
| 747 at 250kph is nearly 500 MJ. Even the biggest, baddest
| high-tesla MRIs are maybe 10MJ. Which is still a 67-tonne M1
| Abrams at 40 mph, so it's not like it's an unimpressive
| amount of energy!
|
| Sure, a tank can stop from 40mph in not much time due to a
| very big braking system (https://youtu.be/f5XUQ2beGfM?t=85),
| but also a tank at 40mph will utterly demolish an MRI suite,
| patient and all if it drives into it.
| duxup wrote:
| Entering the room without permission and wearing a 20lb weight
| training chain ... I look forward to my next visit where they ask
| me if I've got some weight training equipment on me.
| blitzar wrote:
| Caution! This coffee is hot. Avoid pouring on crotch area.
| whycome wrote:
| Do yourself a favour and actually read about that incident.
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| I have read about it and still can't see how mcdonalds
| lost.
| hansvm wrote:
| McDonald's was negligent. The coffee was hot enough to
| cause immediate lasting damage, having it that hot didn't
| benefit any party involved, reducing the temperature
| would have fixed the problem, been as simple as turning a
| knob, and increased customer satisfaction, and they knew
| about the dangers and repeatedly chose to do literally
| nothing about it.
|
| If you tweak elements of the case then you can imagine
| the restaurant winning. As it stands, it's not surprising
| McDonald's lost.
| grues-dinner wrote:
| And they apparently didn't even learn all that much:
| literally this week, but with hot chocolate and an 8-year
| old: https://www.cornwalllive.com/news/cornwall-
| news/young-girl-s...
|
| Maybe this time they won't go on a PR campaign against
| the victim (it's also the UK where you only get real
| damages, so they probably won't care enough, no million
| pound lawsuits here even if it was as serious as the
| original case, which it isn't).
|
| There's definitely a balance between hot drink being hot
| and absolutely scalding, _especially_ when you know you
| 're going to be handing it into a vehicle from a window.
| And it's not an especially onerous thing to turn the
| temperature down, and as you say, no one likes getting 98
| degree paper cup of lava that you can't even sip for 10
| minutes. They say they did control the temperature, so
| maybe it's indeed all on the customers, but I do know I
| have been given some _really_ hot hot drinks in paper
| cups that seem excessive.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| Not just negligent, chronically negligent to the point
| that a court hit the "fuck you fix it" button (punitive
| damages). They had all the chances in the world to turn
| down the heat, use better cups, etc, etc, after any one
| of the prior accidents. They didn't, they just kept
| paying the settlements and the lawsuits, until someone
| got hurt so badly that the court said enough is enough.
|
| It's a textbook perfect example of how punitive damages
| are supposed to work.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Coffee is supposed to be hot! McDonalds now serves tepid
| dishwater instead of coffee.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| > knew about the dangers and repeatedly chose to do
| literally nothing about it
|
| The dangers of... hot coffee? Yeah, everyone knows that.
| That's exactly why they shouldn't have lost to the extent
| that they did.
|
| It's tragic for the person involved obviously; I get why
| emotionally the court would feel sympathy for the victim.
| But objectively speaking its pretty ridiculous for the
| legal system to be awarding punitive damages for
| companies exposing people to normal, reasonable risks
| that everyone encounters as part of everyday life. It
| creates a culture where businesses have to treat grown
| adults like children for fear of huge fines if something
| goes wrong.
|
| At worst McDonald's was probably like 10% responsible for
| the incident but they got treated like they were 100,000%
| responsible.
|
| (The jury actually did find the woman was partially
| responsible, it was the judge that decided on the absurd
| damages amount. It later got reduced and settled out of
| court so all in all I think the system ultimately worked
| okay despite the judge's ridiculous initial decision.)
|
| Edit: I misread, it was actually the jury that made the
| initial ridiculous punitive damages ruling, the judge was
| the one who reduced it later before it got settled out of
| court for an undisclosed (possibly still ridiculously
| high) amount.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > At worst McDonald's was probably like 10% responsible
|
| 80%, according to the jury.
|
| > The jury actually did find the woman was partially
| responsible
|
| Correct, which was factored into the award of actual
| damages, reducing the $200,000 in damages to a $160,000
| award, since it was in a comparative negligence
| jurisdiction.
|
| > it was the judge that decided on the absurd damages
| amount. It later got reduced and settled out of court
|
| No, it was the jury that returned the original $2.7
| million punitive damage award, which the judge reduced to
| $480,000, for a total actual+punitive award of $640k in
| the trial judgement.
|
| The parties did settle out of court while an appeal of
| the trial judgement was pending.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| I see, so it was the jury that was responsible for the
| ridiculous ruling, not the judge. My mistake, I misread.
| Definitely seems like there were some systemic or
| possibly cultural issues at play here.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > I see, so it was the jury that was responsible for the
| ridiculous ruling, not the judge
|
| No, a jury verdict that is not reflected in the trial
| judgement is not a ruling at all.
|
| There was some rush-to-publish reporting of the jury
| verdict prior to the ruling which is the source of the
| whole popular perception of the case, because the
| misunderstanding of the case has deliberately magnified
| ao it can be weaponized by people wanting to limit
| perfectly warranted recovery from actually-at-fault
| corporatiojs by spinning false tales of out-of-control
| judgements.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| That's a fair criticism of the media headlines, but the
| final ruling of $480,000 just in _punitive_ damages ($1M
| inflation-adjusted) is still pretty ridiculous given,
| again, that handling too-hot-to-immediately-drink
| beverages is a normal, reasonable risk that almost
| everyone encounters as part of everyday life. We could
| quibble about about the compensatory damages (80%
| McDonald 's fault seems too high to me, but it's also
| probably not 0%), but I feel that _certainly_ there
| should be no punitive damages for such things.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > That's a fair criticism of the media headlines, but the
| final ruling of $480,000 just in punitive damages ($1M
| inflation-adjusted) is still pretty ridiculous
|
| Given subsequent McDonald's incidents of the same type,
| it was clearly inadequate to serve the function of
| punitive damages, that is, to be sufficient to dissuade
| the willful tortfeasor from repeating the same willful
| tort. (It's quite likely that the original $2.7 million
| award would also have been.)
|
| > handling too-hot-to-immediately-drink beverages is a
| normal, reasonable risk that almost everyone encounters
| as part of everyday life.
|
| That's not an argument that the punitive damage award was
| ridiculous, that's an argument that the jury assessment
| of comparative negligence that figured into the actual
| damage award was wrong. Punitive damages are not even in
| theory about the degree of care that the injured party
| should have applied, that's the comparative negligence
| part of actual damages.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| My point is I don't think McDonalds needs to be legally
| dissuaded from serving hot coffee in the first place,
| certainly not by a court with no law making powers. The
| minutia of the legal statues aren't relevant to my
| argument.
|
| I'm open to the idea of awarding damages for harms caused
| by inherently risky activities as a way of incentivizing
| companies to take extra steps beyond what is legally or
| morally necessary to mitigate those risks, but in such
| cases the damages should be compensatory, not punitive,
| and use a comparative negligence-like standard based on
| the degree to which the risks could have been
| realistically mitigated and the degree to which the
| plaintiffs are themselves personally responsible.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > My point is I don't think McDonalds needs to be legally
| dissuaded from serving hot coffee in the first place
|
| "Willfully causing injury in this way should not be a
| wrong at all" is a very different argument than "the
| damage award was inappropriate for willfully causing
| injury in this way", so it would help if you would not
| disguise your argument for the former positions as one
| for the latter position if you want to have a productive
| exchange.
| D-Coder wrote:
| > The dangers of... hot coffee?
|
| I don't expect hot coffee to put me in the hospital
| needing skin grafts.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| It can and will if you spill enough of it in the wrong
| place, regardless of whether it was made by McDonald's or
| an electric kettle. This is true of any hot beverage or
| even soup.
| OutOfHere wrote:
| The incident with the child seems worse:
|
| > In 2001, a six-year-old boy died of a fractured skull at a New
| York City medical centre while undergoing an MRI exam after its
| powerful magnetic force propelled an oxygen tank across the room.
|
| There shouldn't exist any metals in the room (that are not the
| machine itself), period. The smallest metallic object can fly off
| like a bullet. Everything and everyone that enters the room
| should be required to be scanned with a handheld metal detector.
| jpgvm wrote:
| I like to post this whenever the danger MRI magnetic field
| strength comes into question:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BBx8BwLhqg
| jmclnx wrote:
| >without permission
|
| How is that possible ? I would think at the very least the door
| would be locked.
|
| From quick searches I believe it is a for profit company.
|
| https://opennpi.com/provider/1851878409
|
| Granted that probably does not matter, but to me, for profit
| generally means cut costs, even safety costs to maximize profits.
| bobajeff wrote:
| Good to know the Final Destination series was not exaggerating on
| the hazards of MRIs.
| throwacct wrote:
| I came here to say the same thing.
| russfink wrote:
| I entered an MRI room once when my wife was getting ready to be
| scanned. I had a metal Cross pen in my shirt pocket. Although I
| was 10 feet back, the pen flew out of my pocket, across the room,
| and stuck to the magnet. It was scary.
| itslennysfault wrote:
| That's crazy... Did they bill you for the cost of shutting down
| the MRI and refilling the helium?
| Filligree wrote:
| They probably left it until the next maintenance cycle.
| Nobody wants the downtime.
| hansvm wrote:
| Wouldn't that cause heavy distortion in the image though?
| bracketfocus wrote:
| I know very little about MRIs, but it seems likely that
| they could recalibrate the machine and effectively adjust
| for something small.
|
| Not removing it sounds dangerous though.
| hansvm wrote:
| The problem is that normal MRI math tries its damnedest
| to avoid actually solving the right equations. Instead,
| with a flat enough field, you can assume linearity and
| just FFT the thing. They'll physically place bits of
| metal and magnets at various places on the big magnet to
| calibrate and better adjust the field to being
| approximately linear. A hunk of metal bigger than a shim
| sounds like it would mess with that.
| lostlogin wrote:
| Shim it with some more pens?
|
| It would come off ok, this happens from time to time, but
| that facility needs to lift its game.
|
| Peripheral staff (nurses, anaesthetic techs etc) visiting
| are the usual source of these accidents.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| Or sent the tech in with a plastic putty knife to scrap it
| to somewhere he could get a hand on it and rip it out of
| there.
|
| Even after adding MRI levels of force a 1oz pen is still
| gonna be something that you can pick up.
| hansvm wrote:
| Depending on the mass they may have been able to remove it
| manually. A colleague used to use paperclips to study the
| field lines, and those had very little force.
| JdeBP wrote:
| It comes to something when Fox News is more informative with
| background information about signage and safety protocols, and
| reporting about a technician's warning not to enter, than BBC
| News is.
|
| * https://fox5ny.com/news/long-island-mri-freak-accident
|
| (Many U.S.A. news services do a better job than BBC News does on
| U.S.A. stories. But this is the BBC being beaten by _Fox_ ,
| specificially.)
| its-summertime wrote:
| There are multiple different Fox News services under similar
| names
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WNYW#News_operation Fox 5 NY
| seems that it used to notably be a trailblazer
| JackFr wrote:
| That's reporting by the local affiliate, not _the_ Fox News.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| That's a Fox Affiliate (a broadcast station in the Fox
| broadcast network) _local news_ source. The much denigrated Fox
| News is a cable TV station rated for only for Entertainment
| that purports to be for News and has done much to confuse the
| boundaries between the two in the US skirting truth-in-
| advertising and truth-in-news laws /regulations/common decency
| for the seeming sake of far right propaganda. (I believe the
| British equivalent is The Sun if it was allowed its own 24 hour
| TV channel because despite showing "news-like things"
| "everyone" knows it is only for Entertainment purposes only,
| why else would they include celebrity gossip.)
|
| Many of the Fox Affiliates are still best-in-class local news.
| (Though it varies from city to city.) The Fox News cable
| channel lowered the bar on what Americans think news is
| supposed to be to historic low levels.
| JdeBP wrote:
| The U.K. equivalent is GB News. Its reality is worse than
| your hypothetical. (-:
|
| But the level of Foxness that I was alluding to was not that
| of GB News, but rather more that of Reach PLC; which isn't
| Murdoch-owned, but which runs a whole network of purportedly
| regional news outlets which turn out to be just localized
| skins applied to a big syndicated empire, and which BBC News
| often does better than locally.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Yeah in the US system thanks to some old competition
| requirements the Affiliate Network gets most of the name
| recognition and provides most of the prime time
| entertainment content (a few other content blocks), but the
| stations under that network have their own owners that can
| be more or less damaging, especially in news content, and
| more or less "invisible" in that maybe you only see their
| name in the fine print at the end of credits or copyright
| statements.
|
| One other notorious example is Sinclair Broadcasting [1].
| Sinclair-owned stations include all of the major Affiliate
| Networks in the US and some of the minor ones, but are
| known for how much they farm politically-biased news
| content across their platforms, including trying to pass
| off editorial content as news content.
|
| (ETA: Which is to say that yeah a FOX affiliate gets
| entertainment programming from what is left of Rupert
| Murdoch's empire, but could be getting news content from
| all sorts of places from home-grown proper local journalism
| to content farms from their real owners.)
|
| [1] A humorous rant on it:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvtNyOzGogc
| zigzag312 wrote:
| Interesting that he didn't feel gradual increase of pull force
| while he was approaching the MRI machine.
|
| I guess cubic growth (?) changes from mild to dangerous so
| quickly when walking towards a MRI machine that once you realize
| what happening it's already too late.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| > Interesting that he didn't feel gradual increase of pull
| force while he was approaching the MRI machine.
|
| There isn't a gradual increase in pull when magnets are
| involved. My wife used to work for a company whose product
| involved powerful magnets. For a while they produced a demo kit
| in which a magnet would hold a large ball-bearing levitated
| against gravity. That thing was lethal. If the ball-bearing
| approached the magnet too closely it instantly became a
| dangerously fast finger-crushing hammer.
| voidUpdate wrote:
| I think it's inverse-square, and as you get closer, the
| acceleration increases quadratically, so your speed increases
| faster (possibly cubic?)
| phkahler wrote:
| >> I think it's inverse-square
|
| No, for "a magnet" it's an inverse cube law. I've often
| wondered if the force holding a nucleus together is really
| magnetism. No, physicists you don't need to correct me, I
| know how off the wall that sounds ;-)
| voidUpdate wrote:
| Ah, yes, I was assuming it was essentially like any other
| electromagnetic force, but apparently it being a dipole
| messes with things and it's inverse cube. TIL
| r2_pilot wrote:
| For nuclear forces it's actually the strong force binding
| the nucleus (electromagnetic force is far, far, far too
| weak to do this) but you can theoretically unify the weak
| force and the electromagnetic force into the electroweak
| force :
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroweak_interaction
| wtcactus wrote:
| Magnetic force works quite like gravity (depends on r^2). When
| you drop something it immediately starts going.
| mrlonglong wrote:
| First class candidate for the Darwin Awards.
| UomoNeroNero wrote:
| It's awful to say, but sometimes it's interesting to see
| natural selection at work.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| We didn't evolve to have the warning mechanisms for modern life.
|
| Tell a person there's a tarantula or a cobra in the next room and
| not a second will go by without them being deeply aware of this
| information.
|
| Tell them it's a 3 tesla magnetic field and they'll run in
| carrying a piece of sheet metal and a pocket full of ball
| bearings.
| HelloUsername wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_Awards
| sippeangelo wrote:
| This doesn't track to me. People have been irrationally afraid
| of things since the dawn of time, based purely on hearsay (see
| religion). And surely even the simplest of language serves to
| warn about unseen dangers.
|
| Entering the MRI room myself I was very familiar with the
| dangers of bringing metal inside, to the point where I would
| second guess myself and my own body. "What if my leg bone
| actually has metal in it for some reason?!"
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > "What if my leg bone actually has metal in it for some
| reason?!"
|
| I had that constant thought for the 15 minutes of my knee MRI
| (except s/leg bone/body/). Most discombobulating.
| xattt wrote:
| Wait till you learn about Peripheral Nerve Stimulation
| effects:
|
| https://www.robarts.ca/scholl_group/research/peripheral_ner
| v...
| mcv wrote:
| There's lots of ways we could have metal in our body. A hip
| replacement, a forgotten piercing, old tooth fillings,
| maybe you accidentally swallowed some piece of metal.
|
| If MRI scanners are this deadly, everybody should be really
| thoroughly screened and scanned to be allowed into the
| room. And even into the room next to it. How can the door
| of that room open while the machine is still turned on?
| (Edit: apparently the magnets in these machines usually
| can't be turned off, which changes the question to: how was
| he allowed to enter the room at all?)
|
| But wearing such a heavy chain while accompanying your
| spouse to an MRI scan, is also not the best move.
| mystraline wrote:
| The walls are usually made from mu-metal. This is a metal
| mixture that blocks/attenuates magnetic energy.
|
| Spinning rust hard drives are also made with mu-metal as
| well.
| bapak wrote:
| Indeed. The hospital will pay a lot of money. Metal
| detectors are insanely cheap, there's no reason why there
| shouldn't be one before reaching the door as a default
| cautionary measure.
| lostlogin wrote:
| Depending on how or where they are installed, they risk
| being pointless. Every human has mental on them and it's
| mostly safe (in shoes, bra, zips, buckles, access swipe
| card). Little bits of jewellery are fine. Surgically
| implanted metal is mostly fine.
|
| Having an alarm that goes off for a staff member's bra
| 200x a day leads to normalisation of hearing the alarm,
| and the unsafe things gets missed.
|
| Im an MR tech.
| bmicraft wrote:
| That's a very easy fix. Just make the volume proportional
| to the amount of metal detected.
| lostlogin wrote:
| And the 10+ a day with a knee joint or a hip joint
| replacement?
|
| And then what if they also have a pacemaker or aneurysm
| clip?
|
| An unsafe clip is tiny, and it will kill them. You can't
| depend on a metal detector.
|
| Technology might help, but people following process is
| what safety depends on.
|
| If staff follow the rules the MR suite is very safe.
|
| https://mrisafety.com/
| mcv wrote:
| Of course you don't want to ignore that alarm 200 times a
| day. That's why I'd rather just ban everything with
| metal. All of these things have non-metal alternatives
| that you could easily enforce in such a specialized
| setting. Why wouldn't you, if it can save lives?
| to11mtm wrote:
| > There's lots of ways we could have metal in our body. A
| hip replacement, a forgotten piercing, old tooth
| fillings, maybe you accidentally swallowed some piece of
| metal
|
| One of the reasons they ask what you do for work is
| because if you're doing some sort of job that involves
| working with metal (e.x. cutting pipes, welding, etc)
| there are extra precautions to take.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| There are people who flock towards information about
| technology (probably almost everyone here as well as many in
| their social circles) and there are people who run from
| information about technology.
|
| I know people who if you tried to explain an MRI to them,
| would become visibly uncomfortable and search for any way to
| change the topic.
| balamatom wrote:
| >I know people who if you tried to explain an $X to them,
| would become visibly uncomfortable and search for any way
| to change the topic.
|
| Expected behavior. Explanations of complex topics are to be
| rejected if explainer does not have sufficient authority to
| make behaver hold-still-and-listen.
|
| I know such folk, too, and this is among the thing about
| people which annoys me to no end. If a MRI tech tried to
| explain the shit to one such acquaintance, they would try
| to change the subject like you say. OTOH, if the doctor in
| charge tries the same, the listener will instead have to
| zone out. But zoning out is a more expensive operation, as
| any zooner knows. (Which is why they hold doctors, lawyers,
| and other semi-priests in high reverence, up to pushing
| kids to take up these rather joyless professions to the
| exclusion of all sense.)
|
| Peeps here equally well-behaved other way round tho. C-f
| "mal" = 0. Geez I really needed to witness the absolute by-
| the-book Freudian slip that can be found at 1:55 of one of
| the probably infinite interview cuts, then have MRI safety
| explained to me by hacker noosers on their Monday morning.
| xattt wrote:
| Both can be true. We learn to fear and respect modern
| technology because of training and reinforcement that might
| occur as part of learning.
|
| Consider the "Things I Won't Work With" column. There is a
| healthy degree of respect for various compounds that's
| learned with experience. This is similar to the way that
| (properly trained) electricians work with electricity, and
| nuclear plant techs work around radioactive material.
| moralestapia wrote:
| Hehe, in my case I used to have a metal filling that was
| removed, but I was still worried about a missing piece of it
| or something.
|
| Apparently it's not an issue, even if you do have them.
| conradludgate wrote:
| My first MRI I confirmed I have no metal on my body to the
| technician, but by the time I was inside I suddenly
| remembered I have metal fillings. I was so stressed by the
| time the machine turned on, but yeah no problems at all
| itishappy wrote:
| The machine was already on by the time you were in it.
| The magnet does not get turned off.
| jpeloquin wrote:
| True, but the RF coils do get turned on & off. Heating of
| non-magnetic metal from the radio waves used for scanning
| is another concern, not just magnetic force.
| bapak wrote:
| I think people are just not aware of how bad it is. People
| might think it's "fork in microwave" _oopsie_ bad, not "fire
| at the gas station" _fatal_ bad.
| Velorivox wrote:
| It's certainly bad enough that you shouldn't be able to
| enter a room with an operational MRI machine just like
| that, as a normal guest with no training and no escort. One
| cheap RFID reader could have saved a life here.
| Karawebnetwork wrote:
| > "What if my leg bone actually has metal in it for some
| reason?!"
|
| I have a titanium plate in my head, so it's not magnetic.
|
| When the MRI tech asked if I had any metal in me, I said I
| had titanium on my skull.
|
| She asked if I was sure it was titanium.
|
| I knew it was, but I was nervous, so I said, "I think so."
|
| She half-joked, "Well, if it's not, we'll find out real
| quick."
|
| It was titanium.
|
| But they never really double-checked or anything.
|
| Part of me thinks that because of my age, she could tell it
| wasn't iron or anything dangerous.
|
| But another part of me feels like she honestly didn't care
| that much and meant it when she said we'd find out fast.
| octopoc wrote:
| Wouldn't your head have started to get pulled towards it as
| you approached, so maybe you could stop approaching once
| you felt something weird going on in your head?
| colechristensen wrote:
| The other side is also true though, "man gets killed by cobra
| venom" isn't sensational international news because it's an
| intuitive rational thing we expect to happen. A man getting
| killed by an MRI machine doesn't fit into our intuition so it
| gets much more interest than a snake bite.
| nancyminusone wrote:
| To be fair, most people aren't going to know what they means.
| If anything it's going to sound more like "only 3 huh? That
| doesn't sound very dangerous." Only 3 miles per hour isn't very
| fast. Only 3 degrees outside is cold, but it probably won't
| kill you.
|
| 30,000 gauss sounds a lot scarier.
| mpreda wrote:
| Not to mention that "gauss" sounds deadlier than "tesla" to
| begin with. Talking about choosing the right units.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| Cars are quite deadly though.
| snewman wrote:
| Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/3106/
| littlestymaar wrote:
| Same for 2degC of global warming...
| meindnoch wrote:
| And yet, Koreans are afraid of fans.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| The current generations aren't. It stopped being a thing a
| decade back.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Honestly yeah, why do you need your "workout chain" while
| taking your wife to a medical exam?
|
| Sounds like Darwin Awards material
| rbanffy wrote:
| I'd make sure to look into life insurance and abuse
| complains.
| rbanffy wrote:
| We don't have a sense for detecting 3 Tesla magnets because
| they don't happen in nature. People can see a tarantula, and,
| depending on the snake, hear it as well.
|
| But you need to seriously piss off the tarantula for it to
| engage in a fight with an opponent our size. Most of them are
| sweet and just want to get on with their tiny lives. They are
| well aware we are not food. Poisonous snakes, on the other
| hand, tend to be much less chill. Much like wasps, they seem to
| enjoy causing pain and suffering.
| vunderba wrote:
| Tarantulas covers _A LOT_ of spiders (around 1100 different
| species). You still have to at least be a bit careful around
| them since they have urticating hairs.
|
| > Poisonous snakes, on the other hand, tend to be much less
| chill. Much like wasps, they seem to enjoy causing pain and
| suffering.
|
| Eh, I don't know about that. For example, sea snakes, despite
| being incredibly venomous, are actually pretty timid
| creatures.
|
| Also:
|
| https://www.britannica.com/story/whats-the-difference-
| betwee...
| throwanem wrote:
| Wasps aren't sadists.
| codyb wrote:
| Agreed, most wasps are super chill if you're not a jackass
| to 'em. Watching 'em lick up some sugar water is pretty
| neat in my experience, what with the way they clean their
| little legs.
| int_19h wrote:
| My mom would actually feed wasps by pouring sweet syrup
| or the like in her palm and letting them land and drink
| it from there. She never got stung.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| Another good question is why do we have a sense for detecting
| things that appear vaguely human but aren't (uncanny valley)?
| gadders wrote:
| Similarly: https://www.fox5ny.com/news/courtney-edwards-
| piedmont-airlin...
|
| Intellectually, you can think that "If a jet can move a plane,
| it can move me through space", but you never experience a fan
| even close to that in real life.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| Fear of heights is ingrained, fear of snakes is learned. We can
| definitely do better to educate people on the fear of magnets,
| I figure it's not a priority since we're not going to encounter
| many MRI machines in the wild.
|
| How difficult would it be to install metal detectors to give an
| alarm to people who enter. I have had a few MRIs and they did
| seem too trusting that I properly remembered to remove anything
| magnetic.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Fear of snakes is also biological. Look up the cat cucumber
| videos.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| For some species that makes a lot of sense, but humans do
| not react the same way to cucumbers.
|
| I'm going by; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3L4lxusff1c
| "The Surprising Reason Babies Are NOT Afraid of Snakes |
| Secret Science"
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| I'd say about 1/5 of the MRI centers I've been to had metal
| detectors before entry. And 0/5 had ones that were turned on.
| codyb wrote:
| Maybe if you instead phrased it as "there's a magnetic field in
| there that will shear anything magnetic straight through your
| body if you're holding it on the wrong side of you" that might
| help folk get the picture a bit better? I mean sheesh, I've got
| a B.S. in Computer Engineering and a 3 Tesla magnetic field
| doesn't mean much to me either
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Just a sensitive metal detector around the doorway where you
| enter the MRI room. It sounds like this guy would have had
| the metal detector blaring before he even crossed the
| threshold.
| lostlogin wrote:
| As would staff shoes, bra, jewellery, access card, ring etc
| etc.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| You can have a metal detector that detects a 20 lb chain
| and not a pair of nurse's shoes
| lumpa wrote:
| "There's a huge evil magnet that will tear you apart if you
| have any metal on you" sounds much easier to grasp and less
| likely to lose the listener's attention. Then, when you have
| them listening: "It can grab you from outside the room and
| hurl you into the machine where the evil magnet lives! Any
| metal, be it coins, necklaces, pins in your bones, belt
| buckles, bra wiring, dog tags. Anything can be the end of
| you, be damn sure you don't have any metal on you."
|
| Oh, wait, you still want them willing to go near the machine?
| That complicates things a bit ;)
| htk wrote:
| "The man entered a room at Nassau Open MRI in Westbury, on New
| York's Long Island, without permission as the MRI machine was
| running..."
|
| People think they can do anything they want nowadays.
| tyleo wrote:
| People have always thought they could do anything. If you think
| this is crazy you should see some of the stuff people have been
| doing with cars and motorcycles for the last 5 decades.
| yard2010 wrote:
| I don't get it how in the world someone can just enter the room
| when the device is on. Trusting people to read signs and follow
| the rules is borderline insane. A simple lock mechanism could
| spare life here.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> I don't get it how in the world someone can just enter the
| room when the device is on.
|
| The magnet is _always_ on. His wife was in the room. Unless
| you 're previously aware of the dangers of an MRI machine it
| looks like any other exam room with some equipment in it.
| It's up to the staff to inform and keep people out and
| enforce that. IMHO he should not have even been in the outer
| room wearing a chain like that.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| This article[1] has a good overview of safety procedures
| already in use at other facilities:
|
| > Melonie Longacre, VP of Operations at Northwell Health,
| explained MRI safety protocols, emphasizing the importance
| of multizone procedures to ensure safety around the
| powerful magnet.
|
| > "Zone I is just for awareness that there's an MRI in the
| vicinity, Zone II is the patient screening zone where they
| get screened. Zone III is the post-screening zone, and Zone
| IV is the actual magnet room," she said. "It's important to
| be educated and safe."
|
| It's unclear if Nassau Open MRI (where this incident took
| place) had similar safety protocols. I'm guessing not.
|
| [1]: https://www.fox5ny.com/news/long-island-mri-freak-
| accident
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| While wearing "a 20lb (9kg) chain with a lock that he used for
| weight training."
| foobarian wrote:
| It's literally like reading a guide "How to kill yourself
| with an MRI machine" and following it step by step
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Step 1: Affix excessively large metallic decapitation
| device.
|
| Step 2: Lock metallic decapitation device in place.
| thr0waway001 wrote:
| Dude, exactly what I was thinking. Even if the staff
| weren't telling me to remove it I would instinctively do
| the math:
|
| big fat metal chain + big fat powerful magnet = disaster.
|
| In fact, whenever I hear MRI I instantly think dental
| fillings. You'd think the patients and their handlers would
| instinctively think about all the metal they carry. How
| could big fat metal chain on neck not come to mind?
| isolli wrote:
| A tragic anecdote has shaken France recently, when an
| unsupervised 6-year old entered a NICU, took a premature baby
| and dropped her on the floor. She died of her injuries a few
| hours later.
|
| The same questions are being asked: how come anyone can enter a
| NICU? How could the parents let an unsupervised child roam the
| hospital? How come no one intervened? The worst part is that
| other parents had complained about the unsupervised child the
| day before.
|
| Failures all along... that's often how accidents happen.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| I wish there was a solid way to balance the weight of a
| tragedy (sans the kneejerk human emotional reaction) against
| the proposed solution.
|
| Freak accidents will always happen, and if mitigation is
| simple and cheap, we should do it. But as soon as we get into
| the territory of "NICU doors need to be locked with keycard
| access" (causing every doctor and nurse to do a badge scan
| 40-50 times a day) then I think it's ok to have 1 infant
| death every 50 years globally because of it.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| My rule of thumb for any big organization (like a hospital)
| is that nothing changes until there's a body to explain away.
|
| Yeah, sometimes enough fractional close calls add up (usually
| to a big lawsuit) and policy changes without and death, but
| don't bet on it.
|
| But, on the other end of the spectrum, having all sorts of
| absurd policy and procedure because someone might die so
| incredibly rarely we can't quantify it is terrible too.
| kube-system wrote:
| There are so many dangers in the world that society would
| grind to a halt if we tried to proactively prevent all of
| them.
| poulpy123 wrote:
| Most people don't understand the danger of MRI, myself included.
| I trust the people and follow their directions but I can't really
| visualize what it would be like to get caught with metal in a MRI
| magnetic field.
|
| For quoting the article : << According to the US Food and Drug
| Administration, MRI machines have magnetic fields that will
| attract magnetic objects of all sizes - keys, mobile phones and
| even oxygen tanks - which "may cause damage to the scanner or
| injury to the patient or medical professionals if those objects
| become projectiles". >> the choice of words from both the bbc and
| the FDA don't really convey the risks.
|
| Anyway there are very surprising issues in what is described :
| why did the wife needed her husband's help to get help although
| it is the role of the technicians ? Why was the husband in a
| place where he was able to hear his wife and not being prepped
| for MRI ? Why was it possible for him to enter ? And why wasn't
| the technician able to stop him entering ?
| lurkshark wrote:
| > Why was it possible for him to enter?
|
| This is probably the main one. I could completely understand
| wanting the assistance of a loved one for mundane things like
| standing up.
|
| Although to your "not prepped for MRI" point, it is kind of
| wild that someone with a 20 lbs chain around their neck would
| be allowed even on the same floor as a MRI machine. Although
| last time I saw one in person, the door to the room did have
| some pretty blunt warning text in large print.
| leptons wrote:
| You would think a simple metal detector to go through before
| the lock on the MRI room door unlocks would be a requirement.
|
| I guess maybe the MRI machine might interfere with metal
| detecting?
| scarier wrote:
| Nope, metal detectors are fairly typical for MRI access.
| They just generally aren't set up as an engineering control
| like you suggest.
| leptons wrote:
| I'm not sure what "engineering control" means. Just put
| it in front of the door to the MRI room. Alarm goes off,
| you do not get to enter, it should be as simple as that.
| scarier wrote:
| An engineering control is how your microwave works--if
| the door isn't physically closed, it can't run. The way
| many (most?) hospitals currently operate is called an
| administrative control--analogous to a sign on the
| microwave door telling people not to run the microwave
| with the door open or open the door when the microwave is
| on.
| leptons wrote:
| But MRI machines can't be turned on and shut off that
| easily. As someone here explained, it takes up to 15
| minutes for the magnet in an MRI to "shut down", and
| costs $50,000 each time.
|
| Why not just control access to the room behind a metal
| detector? It would be really simple, but effective. I
| don't think any MRI should be allowed to operate without
| this basic level of protection.
| scarier wrote:
| Sure, an engineering control for MRI room access would be
| implemented differently--that's just the canonical
| example that people are familiar with. One possible
| implementation for MRI access is the airlock method,
| where the inner access door would only be allowed to
| unlock with the outer door locked and no metal detected
| in the space between (also the outer door would be
| prohibited from unlocking when the inner door is
| unlocked, except for some kind of inner emergency
| override that might also be tied to the emergency
| quench).
|
| Literally no one disagrees with you on this, and most (if
| not all) hospital administrators will say they already do
| it the way you suggest. I'm pointing out that the actual
| implementations I'm aware of are often ineffective
| because they use administrative rather than engineering
| controls, and this is a critical distinction people need
| to be more aware of when interacting with dangerous
| systems. Managers, at least in my experience, tend to
| wildly overestimate compliance rates with administrative
| controls, even ignoring any possibility of deliberate
| noncompliance.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Last time I went to an MRI, there was a prep room before the
| MRI machine. There was a stern and visible warning to remove
| anything metallic from your body before going through the
| second door. I am fully aware if the pins on my leg were
| affected, the machine would gladly remove them from my, most
| likely along with the bone and the leg they are attached to.
|
| A lot of fatal accidents are like that - a series of small
| mistakes nobody notices, each individually harmless, followed
| by THAT ONE BIG MISTAKE that ends up killing someone (or a
| lot of people).
| barbazoo wrote:
| That huge chain though.
| barbazoo wrote:
| People with 10kg chains around their neck might not be the
| kind of people that you can tell no to.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Mr. T seems like he'd be quite reasonable if you were
| discussing medical safety procedures.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| His chain is gold though and not magnetic =)
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| That's because Mr. T respects MRI safety.
| chihuahua wrote:
| Mr. T pities the fool who would walk around with an iron
| chain.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| "you need to take off the chain"
|
| "nah man, gotta hit my 5k steps wearing 20lb for my fitness
| goal"
|
| "ok, well just don't go in the room"
|
| "sure"
|
| The kind of interaction that many people will pretty much
| forget having within the hour.
| kotaKat wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJJ9oqmkItI
|
| I love this old GE training video around the time of MRI's
| introduction to the medical market. Even the oldest machines
| could show some significant power back then.
|
| Watching the scale attached to a pipe wrench pulling some
| significant weight on a wrench will help show the forces that a
| 20 pound chain would have made...
|
| _(Oh, and stay for the 'old custodian' tale in the intro of
| this one...)_
| Loughla wrote:
| When that dude got to throw the wrench at the MRI, you know
| he was having his best day at work ever. I wouldn't be able
| to be on camera because of giggling.
| redbar0n wrote:
| The flying wrenches remind me of the Gravity gun i Half-Life
| 2 :D
| alnwlsn wrote:
| I got to take apart an MRI-safe(ish1) video projector recently.
| Turns out it was just a regular DLP projector in an RF
| shielding box, but all the screws and components on the outside
| (anything that could be removed) were either plastic, non-
| magnetic stainless steel, or aluminum. They even converted the
| stock remote control to be powered with a cable instead of a AA
| battery (most batteries have steel cases).
|
| They replaced the lens with a very long throw one so the
| projector could be located far away and bolted to the wall. It
| still had some steel components inside, but the manual made it
| very clear you were not supposed to open the case while in the
| same room with the magnet. No other manual I've read has
| warnings that trying to change a light bulb could kill you.
|
| 1it was designed to be used within the same room as the MRI,
| but not to go into the magnet bore itself. You were supposed to
| securely mount it at a distance where the field strength was
| less than 100 gauss. Since it still contained steel, there were
| still warnings all over that "this device may become a
| projectile" if you got too close to the magnet. Installation
| must have been a bit nerve wracking!
| potato3732842 wrote:
| >Installation must have been a bit nerve wracking!
|
| They almost certainly just selected a drywall anchor based on
| the rating advertised on the package and sent it without any
| more thought, their ass was covered.
|
| Big picture people who take a step back think about what
| they're doing don't tend to find themselves installing
| projectors in hospitals, or if they do they aren't there very
| long.
| alnwlsn wrote:
| Likely true. For all the warnings the thing had about
| "securing" it, it did not have very many mount points or
| threaded holes to do so, just some rubber feet. Probably
| was just sat on a shelf and tied off with a nylon strap. I
| suppose you aren't going to casually walk past the magnet
| with a bulky projector like this as you would do with a
| screwdriver you forgot in your pocket.
| KingMob wrote:
| > Big picture people who take a step back think about what
| they're doing don't tend to find themselves installing
| projectors in hospitals, or if they do they aren't there
| very long.
|
| They're installed for fMRI research, to show stimuli to
| study participants.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| My point was that a maintenance guy who without prompting
| thinks to himself "hmm, drywall anchors are rated for
| vertical loading, not horizontal, let's find a
| (invariably metal, because office) stud and toggle bolt
| that bitch" is shortly onto bigger better things.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| People should try a magnet fishing magnet.
|
| A fist-sized powerful magnet that's next to impossible to
| straight-up pull out of ANYTHING. You need to slide it
| carefully and NOT let your fingers get in between it and
| anything else.
|
| Now imagine a magnet that's infinitely more powerful than that.
| hwillis wrote:
| A good N52 neodymium magnet can be 1.5 tesla- MRIs are
| usually 1.5 tesla. The pull force is around the same too- a
| steel object will experience say 20g, and 100 lb fishing
| magnets are not hard to find.
|
| The difference is the size. Even a large magnet only hits
| that 20g force over an inch or two. An MRI pulls at that
| force over a full foot or more; equivalent to dropping the
| object from 20'+. Worse, the MRI _starts_ pulling at 5 or 10
| feet away. Objects can experience a tremendous amount of
| uncontrolled acceleration in fractions of a second.
|
| It's not like a black hole- unless you are trapped under
| something very large, the crushing force is substantial but
| not incredible. In fact inside the tube the gradient is
| actually _smaller_ than the entrance of the tube- you are
| pulled in strongly, but once inside the tube you are pressed
| against the wall somewhat less forcefully. Instead it 's like
| an invisible waterfall, and any metal will be swept away in
| it, fast enough to put holes in you.
| KingMob wrote:
| Not sure about medicine, but at least in research, most MRI
| fields are 3T and up.
| masfuerte wrote:
| Related:
|
| https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfmaude/d...
| OisinMoran wrote:
| Calling a 9 kg chain a "necklace" is a bit misleading. It makes
| it seem like it could have gone in unnoticed. "medical episode"
| is also very vague, what was the actual cause of death?
| richrichardsson wrote:
| Very likely severed spinal column, if not complete
| decapitation.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| The article says he had time to say goodbye to his wife
| before he suffocated and later died at a hospital.
|
| Which makes sense since it's about the same timeline of death
| and outcome you'd expect from an industrial accident
| involving big industrial chain at a hundred pounds per link
| or whatever.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| I wouldn't %100 trust an eye witness account, especially
| for something so traumatic where an alternate outcome might
| give them some solace.
| netsharc wrote:
| I don't think the human body is that fragile, the magnet
| probably dragged his body, head first, until it hit a solid
| object, in this case the cover of the MRI machine. Slamming
| your head at that speed isn't that healthy.
| kulahan wrote:
| This was my assumption as well. What the heck has everyone
| assuming it's a decapitation? Dude was dragged by the neck
| at high speed towards a large machine. Massive head injury
| sounds very reasonable, maybe even expected.
| fluidcruft wrote:
| Inside the scanner the back-of-the-envelope is a 20lb
| weight ferrous object experiences 2000lb force and his
| neck was in the middle of that. Unconfirmed reports have
| described it as an "internal decapitation".
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Given that the chain drug him across the room, I can imagine
| that the actual death might be quite grisly - if it can cause a
| man to be "hurled towards the machine" it's possible it was
| worse than a mere strangulation, and that sort of detail isn't
| really required in the article.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| The article covers the timeline of his death. Whatever the
| details they weren't so incapacitating as to prevent him from
| saying goodbye to his wife before losing consciousness.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| The timeline supplied being "he waved goodbye to me and
| then his whole body went limp".
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| A day later, after being taken to a separate facility and
| suffering multiple _heart attacks_ (I have no idea what
| the connection there is).
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/21/new-york-
| mri...
|
| > He endured "a medical episode" at that point which left
| him in critical condition at a hospital, and he was
| pronounced dead a day later, police said.
|
| > Adrienne told News 12 that her late husband had
| suffered several heart attacks after the incident with
| the MRI machine and before his death.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| That doesn't seem to be specified, is it?
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| Sorry, added a source and quote.
| jacurtis wrote:
| There is a video of it floating around for the morbidly
| curious. I won't link it here. It is very NSFL. I was
| accidently shown it while scrolling instagram and wish I
| hadn't seen it.
|
| He is able to talk, you can make out his words, but he is
| clearly choking or being strangled. He was fully sucked into
| the machine. There was a very strong guy trying with
| everything to pull him out. He made some pretty sad and
| harrowing words when he realized he wasn't going to make it.
| Again, the video is out there if you really want to see it. I
| do NOT recommend it though.
| privatelypublic wrote:
| Here's a well known and SFW training video about MRI
| magnets. It'll put the problem into perspective without
| needing eye-bleach.
|
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=kLjxhuybFWo
| SwiftyBug wrote:
| That seems to be very strong. What's the effect of this
| type of magnetic field on the iron in our blood?
| goku12 wrote:
| Apparently, oxygenated hemoglobin and blood plasma are
| diamagnetic, while deoxygenated hemoglobin is
| paramagnetic. Meaning, magnetic properties are determined
| by the molecules, not its elements. I assume that
| whatever attraction or repulsion caused by even the MRI
| magnets are weak compared to the forces involved in
| Brownian motion. So don't expect anything substantial.
| msgodel wrote:
| That's not so surprising. Iron isn't magnetic in all its
| oxidation states.
| userbinator wrote:
| I've seen a lot of gruesome stuff so I'm not bothered by
| that, but curious how someone got a camera, presumably with
| ferrous parts, in there without it also getting pulled into
| the magnet.
| throwawayffffas wrote:
| Phones now days don't have a lot of ferrous stuff in them
| they are pretty much all battery, copper, silicon, glass,
| plastic and maybe aluminum. Your keys probably have more
| steel on them than your phone.
|
| People have gone in MRIs with phones with no adverse
| effects, except maybe damaged speakers. It's more likely
| that the MRI is going to damage the electronics than it
| will physically rip it off you.
|
| It's all about the amount of ferrous material involved.
| It can take your keys of your pocket, but I doubt you
| can't peel them of it.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| The video is a fake.
| JackFr wrote:
| According to other articles I've read, multiple heart attacks.
| patcon wrote:
| Yes, and didn't die until the next day.
|
| I believe many articles are leaving these parts unsaid due to
| sensational assumptions they benefit from in virality.
|
| EDIT: source https://healthimaging.com/topics/medical-
| imaging/magnetic-re...
| ottah wrote:
| That wasn't a necklace, 20lb and a lock isn't jewelry, it's a
| collar. Probably bdsm, or pup play. It definitely was not
| jewelry. Also likely iron or steel, which probably made this
| incident worse.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| Someone said it was a strength training thing, some crossfit
| cult thing of carrying heavy crap around your neck.
| ramenbytes wrote:
| The wife says the chain and lock were for weight training.
| Telemakhos wrote:
| It was for weight training (according to [0]). Weightlifters
| wear them on the neck to help build neck muscle.
|
| [0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/21/new-york-
| mri...
| darth_avocado wrote:
| As much as I would like to say "What are you doing weight
| training in an MRI room?", a bigger pressing question is
| "How did the staff miss this?".
|
| MRI is extremely dangerous when it comes to having magnetic
| metals on you and it's SOP from the hospital to ensure
| there is none when the patient goes in. The one time I had
| to get it done (in a different country) I had to walk
| through TSA like metal detectors before I get into the MRI
| room. Is that not common here? Not even hand held wands? We
| just trust the patient now?
| codyb wrote:
| I guess the timeline suggests maybe they never expected
| him to go in, until the wife called out to him.
|
| Maybe he's a big dude and it was just under his
| shirt/vest or something?
|
| When I look up "weight training necklace" it looks like a
| weight disk at the end of some rope, so maybe it wasn't
| particularly apparent from the technicians view.
|
| Obviously, not excusing the tech here at all.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| Man, I don't wanna bag a dead guy, but I know fuckall
| about medicine, and even less about MRI's, the ONLY thing
| I know about MRI's is that they're composed of giant ass
| magnets and you do not want to be wearing any metal near
| them.
|
| I guess there's no guarantee anyone would learn that but
| fuuuuck. What a way to go.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| Not sure how representative I am here, but I had no idea
| that the magnets were powered up except during the scan.
|
| My layman's understanding was that they always kept the
| superconductors fully chilled, but I assumed they only
| ran electricity through them when needed.
|
| Only as I'm writing this does it occur to me that
| _because of_ the superconduction, the magnets will remain
| energized for a very long time unless intentionally
| discharged.
| unsnap_biceps wrote:
| When I had a mri, they didn't use a wand or detector.
|
| I wonder if the chain was gold colored and so the people
| assumed it was gold and safe.
| privatelypublic wrote:
| 1) ah yes, 5kg if gold in this guy's neck has to be real!
| 2) a non-magnetic metallic mass that large will still
| likely screw up the image, if not the machine.
| GLdRH wrote:
| 5kg gold makes a surprisingly slender chain, actually.
| I've heard 1kg gold is as big as an iphone.
| unsnap_biceps wrote:
| I seems like an easy mistake to make. The imaging was
| done, per the article "His wife told local media she had
| called him into the MRI room after her scan" and so the
| technician could have looked at it being gold colored and
| didn't apply critical thinking to presume it wasn't real.
| There was no concern about screwing up the image.
| johnisgood wrote:
| I had MRI a lot of times (I have MS). Every single time
| as we are walking to the machines, the nurse / technician
| / whoever asks me a couple of questions (which I have to
| fill before going in as well). Then I have to take off my
| clothes in the changing room. They would have never
| missed it. And no one can just simply walk into the
| corridor (there is a door) that has the door to the MRI
| machine. Even if they do so, they would be noticed
| immediately.
| lostlogin wrote:
| Taking a large metal item into an RF transmitter is
| problematic too. Heating can burn people.
| nisse72 wrote:
| Doesn't even need to be metal: they make sure you aren't
| touching skin-to-skin anywhere while you are in the
| machine (for example, don't put your hands together) in
| order to avoid induced current loop burns.
|
| https://riteadvantage.com/understanding-and-reducing-
| burns-i...
| thekevan wrote:
| >Ms Jones-McAllister said the visit on 16 July was not
| her and her husband's first time at the MRI facility. It
| was also not the first time that the employee had seen
| her husband's weight that he used for training, she said.
|
| >She claimed an employee and her husband previously "had
| a conversation about it before: 'Oh that's a big chain'".
| everforward wrote:
| He wasn't the patient, and the article says he entered
| without permission when his wife called him in after the
| scan was done. It sounds like she called him and he went
| in either before anyone could stop him, or against the
| protests of hospital staff (no speculation either way).
|
| I wonder why it isn't interlocked so the door is locked
| while the MRI is on. Maybe fire code? Emergency medical
| response seems unsafe unless there's a team of people
| with special non-ferrous gear waiting around. They'd have
| to shut off the MRI anyways to avoid stethescopes and
| what not becoming projectiles.
| lostlogin wrote:
| > I wonder why it isn't interlocked so the door is locked
| while the MRI is on.
|
| It's always on. It's always magnetic. The rf comes on
| when the scanner is imaging.
| everforward wrote:
| Well that would certainly explain it. I thought they were
| some form of electromagnet.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| > He wasn't the patient
|
| Everyone had to go through the detectors including the
| staff to avoid accidents, which is why I brought my
| experience up.
| supportengineer wrote:
| Why wouldn't every human being involved in this be
| essentially screaming at him not to bring that thing anywhere
| near MAGNETIC resonance imaging?
| codyb wrote:
| This explains so much. I was wondering how in the hell the
| damn chain I've already broken twice with mere snags was
| going to hurl my body through the air towards a machine like
| that.
|
| Yeesh, what would happen with a wedding ring? If it was a
| magnetic band would it just sheer through your finger
| whizzing towards the machine?
| onemoresoop wrote:
| > Yeesh, what would happen with a wedding ring?
|
| Probably not enough mass to kill you but the pull must be
| considering.
| thekevan wrote:
| Read the article.
|
| >She said he was wearing a 20lb (9kg) chain with a lock that
| he used for weight training.
| ottah wrote:
| I read the article, I don't buy it was for weight training.
| Certainly doesn't require a padlock around your neck to add
| resistance weights. Also I have never seen a person wearing
| a chain daily for resistance training. I've seen weighted
| vests, and other easier to wear gear. I do however know
| many people in kink who wear chain collars, and don't tell
| strangers what it actually is.
| prepend wrote:
| My experience is different than yours.
|
| I know many people who wear weighted chains everywhere as
| part of weight training. Some using locks to fasten the
| two ends together.
|
| I don't know anyone in kink who does this.
|
| There are things in the world different than what I know.
| shrubble wrote:
| If it was any kind of weight training vest it would be wrapped
| around the chest and therefore any orientation would involve
| him being squeezed by the magnetic force. Imagine two dinner
| plates, front and back; whether he was facing forward or back
| wouldn't change much.
| whalesalad wrote:
| 9kg is nearly 20lbs in freedom units. That is an insane amount
| of metal to wear around your neck, let alone in the vicinity of
| an active MRI machine.
| adolph wrote:
| The real story here is that breakaway connectors exist and yet
| are still not used.
|
| While the MRI angle makes it "newsworthy," there are many ways in
| which a chain might be caught and cause injury if it does not
| disconnect at a lower energy level than the minimum amount of
| injury the wearer is willing to accept.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| As an anesthesiologist I routinely gave anesthesia to patients
| (usually children) undergoing MRIs over a 38-year career.
|
| I never had anxiety in my daily practice in the OR but anesthesia
| in the MRI suite ALWAYS provoked anxiety because:
|
| 1. I had to anesthetize the patient in the sub-basement, two
| floors below the main OR -- where there were always other
| anesthesiologists able to help in an emergency. In the MRI suite,
| no one could hear my silent screams if I got in trouble nor were
| there knowledgeable extra hands to, for example, squeeze the
| breathing bag if I needed to prepare for an emergency intubation.
|
| 2. Once the patient was anesthetized and the heavy door to the
| MRI machine room was closed and locked, I could only monitor my
| unconscious patient through a darkened heavy glass window. Sure,
| I had monitors for EKG and oxygen saturation outside the MRI
| room, near the control board where technicians operated the
| machine, but the automatic blood pressure cuff inflator dial on
| the anesthesia machine was inside the room and hard to see
| through the dark glass.
|
| 3. It was my good fortune to never have had an emergency in the
| MRI suite, but events such as that reported above in the OP
| happened from time to time in hospitals throughout the U.S. and
| were occasionally reported in the anesthesia literature with the
| expected cautionary advice. Many more events occurred than were
| reported.
| zabzonk wrote:
| Why darkened glass?
| nness wrote:
| From a cursory search, seems like 1. Privacy, and 2. RF
| shielding of equipment behind the glass and from influencing
| the MRI scan itself.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| Privacy is irrelevant: the MRI suite is so remote from the
| rest of the hospital that no one goes there who isn't
| supposed to be there.
| Incipient wrote:
| Except this guy in the article, I suppose...
| bookofjoe wrote:
| That's what happens when you open a neighborhood MRI
| facility...
| Luc wrote:
| It's not darkened on purpose, but as a result of containing
| electromagnetic radiation shielding.
| queuebert wrote:
| The EM shielding is simply a wire mesh, not tint. The glass
| doesn't have to be darkened, and probably wasn't, but often
| the room is darkened to make the scan more comfortable and
| calming. Also, in my experience the room doesn't have many
| lights, and the patient is inside the bore, making them
| hard to see.
| sithadmin wrote:
| MRI and other radiology suites use lead glass windows,
| which are incredibly thick and tinted dark-yellowish-
| orange. Visibility through them is okay, but not great.
| grues-dinner wrote:
| MRI windows aren't leaded, that would do nothing for RF
| or magnetic interference. MRI windows contain copper mesh
| and are designed to integrate with the rest of the
| Faraday cage to both keep the RF generated by the machine
| in the room, and keep external radiation away from the
| sensors. Also keep the acoustic noise in the room.
|
| This also doesn't do anything against the (static)
| magnetic field, which is really hard to block except with
| material like steel, which don't make very good windows.
| Newer machines have a counter-magnet to redirect the
| field to extend less far from the machine.
| milano89 wrote:
| >I routinely gave anesthesia to patients
|
| benzodiazepines?
| bookofjoe wrote:
| General anesthesia; the nurse attending the patient was
| qualified to administer benzodiazepines.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| >In the MRI suite, no one could hear my silent screams
|
| I understand it is caused the 'donut of death' for that reason.
| rscho wrote:
| The MRI+anesthesia problem has recently got much worse, since
| we're now seeing MRI hybrid ORs pop up. Compounded with the
| 'lean management' principles _en vogue_ in hospitals, this is a
| disaster waiting to happen. Personnel is often affected to
| multiple ORs, including standard and hybrid sites.
| seanicus wrote:
| Thanks for the insight. re:#3 how do mistakes not get reported?
| Is it because this incident resulted in a police report and is
| unusual in this context?
| rscho wrote:
| This time it killed someone. Usually, it's just a bed or a
| respirator that ends up stuck in the ring.
| Wistar wrote:
| Back in 2001 a 6-year-old boy undergoing an MRI was killed
| when an unsecured oxygen tank was pulled in to the machine.
|
| https://www.psqh.com/analysis/mri-safety-10-years-later/
| bookofjoe wrote:
| Deaths in the OR like cardiac arrests, fatal hemorrhage from
| burst aneurysms, etc. are always reported within the
| hospital. Whether others outside learn about such things is
| often a matter of persistent family and relatives demanding
| to see the actual death report and contemporaneous notes.
|
| Fatal mistakes usually stay within hospital departments and
| are discussed at length in regular confidential Morbidity and
| Mortality conferences.
| vonneumannstan wrote:
| >1. I had to anesthetize the patient in the sub-basement, two
| floors below the main OR -- where there were always other
| anesthesiologists able to help in an emergency. In the MRI
| suite, no one could hear my silent screams if I got in trouble
| nor were there knowledgeable extra hands to, for example,
| squeeze the breathing bag if I needed to prepare for an
| emergency intubation.
|
| You are allowed to put patients under general with no one else
| present? That doesn't seem like it should be possible
| rscho wrote:
| There's always someone else. But the radiologist might not be
| at his/her most efficient doing anesthesia & resuscitation...
| bookofjoe wrote:
| No -- there is NOT always someone else. And if others
| present are nurses, aides, radiologists, etc., they are
| generally of zero help in a crunch.
| fluidcruft wrote:
| Pretty sure that at the very least you are not operating
| the scanner. And the scanner generally nowadays must
| operate under the plus one staffing model (one certified
| technologist per scanner plus at least one additional
| level 2 MRI safety trained staff in the immediate
| vicinity). So no, you are not "alone".
| rscho wrote:
| He said he's been doing that for a long time. Plenty of
| time for stuff to happen, and security guidelines were
| not always as they are now.
| fluidcruft wrote:
| An anesthesiologist was never operating an MRI scanner at
| any point in history.
| rscho wrote:
| Indeed, but you won't find yourself alone during the MRI.
| When you're preparing or finishing the case though, the
| RX tech and the radiologists often suddenly feel a need
| for a break. Same thing happens everywhere we go: the
| anesthesiologist comes in, everyone's here. 2 min later,
| you look around and everybody magically disappeared.
| fluidcruft wrote:
| That's never happened anywhere I work unless you're
| counting being in the control room as "magically
| disappearing". To be fair I only have 25 years in the
| field and don't use AI to answer so what do I know.
| rscho wrote:
| Look, he might use AI but I'm not. I also have 20 years
| in the field, and I've lost count of how many times I
| found myself alone with a risky patient. Yes, oftentimes
| people are just 10m away. Yes, that's not supposed to
| happen. But that's often far enough for us
| anesthesiologists to wish we'd be somewhere else.
| Perspectives and empathy matter. Try to put yourself in
| our shoes, sometimes. For the record, I'm the main hybrid
| MRI OR guy in my hospital, so I work near MRIs most days.
| fluidcruft wrote:
| The only way anything you are saying makes sense is if
| you are counting people being in the control room as not
| being there. They can see you, they can hear you, you can
| hear them. You are not "alone" except in an overly
| dramatic sense. This goes in triplicate for a hybrid
| system operating today.
| rscho wrote:
| The RX bay over here is like 150m^2, serves 6 MRI rooms,
| has nooks and corners and doubles as the patient waiting
| bay. Having the tech busy elsewhere while putting people
| under or waking them up is not a rarity. I agree the
| security is better for hybrid rooms, as they have their
| own separate control rooms and techs won't leave when the
| machine is running. I don't think I'm being dramatic, but
| you sure seem to have a cozy job if you're allowed to
| constantly sit around in the control room while
| anesthesia is under way.
| fluidcruft wrote:
| No idea what an RX bay is but your choice of units
| certainly seems non-American. But thanks for derailing a
| story about someone who died in the US in a situation
| that has nothing to do with anesthesia to whine that you
| feel lonely and important and while chiding others for
| their supposed lack of empathy. And now you're whining
| that you feel alone while outside the MRI room? I guess?
| MRI has no control over anesthesia staffing in the US.
| That's your own problem.
| rscho wrote:
| That's not a fair assessment of our conversation, and it
| seems to me you've been aggressive from the start.
| Honestly, you reek of the typical US prejudice that 'all-
| docs-are-arrogant-and-speak-only-to-spite-others'. You
| can't imagine the relief when I got out of US healthcare
| and that kind of daily interaction with hospital staff
| and patients.
| fluidcruft wrote:
| Yeah because the top comment in a story about a MRI death
| is some narcissistic anesthiologist talking nonsense.
| rscho wrote:
| I happen to agree partially, and wasn't trying to fight
| you over this matter. I generally don't have much love
| for US docs' attitude either. Take care.
| hyperdimension wrote:
| Not part of this, but that's not really called for.
|
| It just seems you two have different experiences from
| possibly different countries is all.
| rscho wrote:
| Yeah, I agree that we can find ourselves alone sometimes,
| although that's not really supposed to happen. For sure,
| most people usually aren't that useful anyway.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| >You are allowed to put patients under general with no one
| else present? That doesn't seem like it should be possible
|
| Every day in ORs around the world manuy thousands of
| anesthesiologists -- and CRNAs where approved -- put patients
| under general with no one else present. Are you proposing
| that two anesthesiologists be assigned per patient, like
| scheduled airlines?
|
| Should piloting a plane solo be outlawed?
|
| If, after three years of residency and roughly 1,500 cases
| done under supervision, many more done without supervision, a
| written examination, and an oral examination, you aren't
| qualified to administer a general anesthetic solo, then you
| have NO business giving general anesthesia no matter how many
| other qualified or unqualified others are present.
| fluidcruft wrote:
| Accreditation is a thing. You don't have to be accredited
| to practice medicine. But you might want to be if you want
| insurance or the government to pay you for practicing
| medicine.
| rscho wrote:
| I agree you should be able to provide solo, but there is
| also substantial evidence supporting the addition of a CRNA
| to make anesthesia teams, that are safer (and even more
| expensive) than either CRNA or MD operating alone. In many
| countries, teams are the standard of care.
| vonneumannstan wrote:
| Im sorry but how does this possibly jive with what you
| literally just said?
|
| > In the MRI suite, no one could hear my silent screams if
| I got in trouble nor were there knowledgeable extra hands
| to, for example, squeeze the breathing bag if I needed to
| prepare for an emergency intubation.
|
| Presumably the patient just dies in that scenario that you
| are supposedly qualified and prepared for?
| rscho wrote:
| > Presumably the patient just dies in that scenario that
| you are supposedly qualified and prepared for?
|
| Yeah, can happen. That doesn't mean you did something
| wrong. Sometimes (very rarely), shit happens even though
| you've planned it all according to guidelines. What he's
| saying is that when shit hits the fan, he's really
| grateful if someone's there to assist with basic moves
| while he's trying to control the more pressing matters. I
| can relate.
| vonneumannstan wrote:
| To me it reads like anesthesia in the MRI shouldn't be
| allowed or needs better supervision.
|
| >he's really grateful if someone's there to assist with
| basic moves while he's trying to control the more
| pressing matters.
|
| I think they were saying theres literally no one there to
| help.
|
| >Yeah, can happen. That doesn't mean you did something
| wrong. Sometimes (very rarely), shit happens even though
| you've planned it all according to guidelines.
|
| Emblematic of the broken US healthcare system. The
| guideline creates an easily preventable scenario where
| the patient is highly likely to die for no real reason.
| rscho wrote:
| > To me it reads like anesthesia in the MRI shouldn't be
| allowed or needs better supervision.
|
| It must certainly be allowed, as it greatly benefits some
| patients. Believe me, I'd be most happy if I was
| forbidden to enter MRI rooms.
|
| > I think they were saying theres literally no one there
| to help.
|
| This might happen quite infrequently, and usually just
| for a very short time. Problem is that others have their
| own jobs to do, and sometimes you get unlucky at just the
| worst time. It's certainly not common that no one's
| there, and theres almost always someone near. But since
| you can't leave the patient, it might be that you have to
| yell for 20-30s before someone notices you're in trouble.
|
| > Emblematic of the broken US healthcare system. The
| guideline creates an easily preventable scenario where
| the patient is highly likely to die for no real reason.
|
| I'm not currently practicing in the US. I don't think
| that's a fair assessment. Guidelines are born in patient
| blood, and although adaptation is a must deviating from
| guidelines still remains a bad idea most of the time.
| s__s wrote:
| > It must certainly be allowed, as it greatly benefits
| some patients.
|
| Is this for patients that can't stay calm? It seems to me
| there would be plenty of far safer ways to sedate them.
| Example: some Xanax
| rscho wrote:
| many situations: mental illness, transport from ICU, exam
| during surgery, etc. So no, Xanax isn't enough.
| lostlogin wrote:
| > Once the patient was anesthetized and the heavy door to the
| MRI machine room was closed and locked, I could only monitor my
| unconscious patient through a darkened heavy glass window.
|
| Why was the door locked?
| fragmede wrote:
| So no one can accidentally walk into the room while wearing
| metal while it is on, to prevent injuries like the post we're
| commenting on, from happening.
| fluidcruft wrote:
| No, that's wrong. The locks are because the magnet is
| always on but the scanner is not always staffed. The
| scanner door is never locked when the scanner is staffed or
| a patient is inside.
| fragmede wrote:
| interesting!
| lostlogin wrote:
| The door shouldn't be locked when staff are present.
|
| It certainly shouldn't with people inside.
|
| I work in MRI.
| fluidcruft wrote:
| There's some sort of latching mechanism to seal the faraday
| cage. Sometimes it's a latch, sometimes it's pneumatic or a
| bladder that inflates.
|
| The doors can also lock (I'm pretty sure they are required to
| be locked when qualified personnel are not present) but
| usually they are not locked when the scanner is staffed and
| in use.
| BuildTheRobots wrote:
| Faraday cage makes sense considering the RF sensitivities
| involved with MRI.
|
| I do wonder if someone being in the room is enough to
| distort a scan? As there's no ionising radiation danger, it
| always seemed odd that you were left alone in there.
| fluidcruft wrote:
| No, people in the room won't interfere unless they are
| doing things inside the scanner during the scan. MRI
| generally operate at radiowave frequencies (the faraday
| cages mostly keep radio stations out). There's other
| stuff they're blocking but radio stations are the
| strongest interference.
| BuildTheRobots wrote:
| In that case, why (in the above example) does the
| anaesthetist have to monitor from, or a nurse or family
| member have to wait outside?
|
| I understand there's magnet safety worries, but if the
| anaesthetist is knocking someone out on the scanner bed,
| doesn't that prove them magnet safe?
| fluidcruft wrote:
| I don't understand your question. The anesthesiologist
| was describing equipment that was not safe to have in the
| room and was positioned outside the room to be viewed
| through the observation window.
|
| Many sites screen individuals to accompany patients. It's
| fairly common in pediatrics.
|
| If by "the above case" you are talking about the accident
| that happened, it has nothing whatsoever to do with
| anesthesia in the first place. It was an outpatient knee
| MRI performed without anesthesia at a free standing
| clinic (not a hospital). Based on the wife's description
| of what happened, the technologist brought her husband
| into the room at her request to help her up after the
| scan had finished and the technologist failed to screen
| him.
| BuildTheRobots wrote:
| Sorry, I completely misunderstood what they said. My
| mental picture was the equipment being _in_ the room
| attached to the patient (and safe to be so), but the
| person being stuck outside unable to easily intervene. My
| experience with MRIs is always being alone in a room
| which backed that up.
|
| I'm not even thinking of this incident. My base query is
| why MRI patients seem to always be alone in the room.
| Ignore all the anaesthetics too; I've seen them refuse to
| let a nervous patients family member stand in the room
| during the scan even though it could completely calm the
| patient... that's what seems odd to me. This is based on
| UK hospital experiences; I'm not sure if it's universal.
|
| The incident in question is sad and seems avoidable, but
| I hadn't even got that far yet; I got stuck on the
| top(ish) comment of "(Once the patient was anesthetized
| and the heavy door to the MRI machine room was closed and
| locked,) - I could only monitor my unconscious patient
| through a darkened heavy glass window". My thinking went
| "surely being in the room would be better" -> "they never
| seem to let anyone in the room" -> "why not?" - and then
| I confused you and we ended up here :)
| lostlogin wrote:
| > I've seen them refuse to let a nervous patients family
| member stand in the room during the scan even though it
| could completely calm the patient... that's what seems
| odd to me. This is based on UK hospital experiences; I'm
| not sure if it's universal.
|
| We do let family members in, we just try to avoid it.
| Having extra people there is extra problems, extra safety
| issues and makes everything slow. 'It completely calms',
| is rarely true. We are good at getting patients through
| scans - we do it 50x a day.
| lostlogin wrote:
| MR also causes issues outside the facility if you scan
| with the door open.
|
| I worked somewhere that had a lot of MR scanner in the
| area and the coast guard sent a letter as someone was
| routinely leaving the door open and messing with the
| airwaves.
|
| MRs have powerful transmitter - which is why you heat up
| during imaging.
| lostlogin wrote:
| Sort of?
|
| It should be lockable when no staff are present and no one
| is in there.
|
| It just needs to close when in use.
| azalemeth wrote:
| We have ear defenders and staff inside and monitoring visible
| in both locations -- anaesthetic machine in the control room.
| There's not much you can safely do in the fringe field but
| you can do CPR and rapidly get someone out of the room (and
| before my spinal injury I used to practice both of those
| regularly, particularly when part of a team scanning patients
| with inotropes)
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Why is anyone getting general anesthesia for an MRI? It's a
| non-invasive procedure.
| lostlogin wrote:
| Critically ill patients, animals, children/babies.
| Xiol32 wrote:
| To add to the sibling comment, being stuck in a small,
| incredibly loud tube usually pinned under some receiver isn't
| great for claustrophobic patients either.
| BuildTheRobots wrote:
| A lot of people get panic attacks / claustrophobia and are
| incapable of getting in or staying still for a scan.
|
| I have a lot of sympathy. I'm pretty good in confined spaces
| usually, but even after multiple MRIs it's still a
| surprisingly stressful experience. The buildup and safety
| questions make the pre-experience worrying. The aperture is
| surprisingly small. Depending on the scan, part of you might
| be caged in place, and it's extremely noisy and you're aware
| of a lot of mass and power spinning very close to your face.
|
| Also, some of the radiologists don't help. It's not
| deliberate, but they're entirely desensitised to the
| experience (and often haven't actually gone through it
| themselves; which again seems crazy considering the lack of
| radiation). My last scan was of my lower back, but they were
| already set up (from the previous scan) to feed me in head
| first rather than feet first. From their point of view it
| saves a bit of faffing with the software and moving the
| pillow to the other end. From a patients point of view it
| makes all the difference in the world; it's a very different
| psychological experience having your legs inside with your
| head free, vs being stuck head first in something and having
| it whizz past next to your head.
|
| I've had a goodly (read unhealthy) number of CT and MRI scans
| and I'm bright enough to understand which one is
| significantly more detrimental to my long term health. I'm
| also aware that on a subconscious almost cellular level, it's
| the benign one that absolutely terrifies me every time...
| seydor wrote:
| A normal necklace wouldn't cause such an accident no? This was a
| heavy workout chain, a bizarre item to wear when going to a
| hospital
| tjpnz wrote:
| More likely to end up with a burn mark in the shape of the
| necklace.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Feels like a midlife crises gone awry.
| wat10000 wrote:
| Lots of "why don't they..." comments here.
|
| This is international news, which means that this kind of event
| is extremely rare. People are often pretty dumb, and magnetic
| metal is common, so that means that the existing precautions are
| very effective. There's probably room for improvement, but there
| isn't some blisteringly obvious thing that's been overlooked that
| would save many lives.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| This was not the sort of "paint the room" liveleak tier accident
| that a hell of a lot of people seem to want to assume it was.
|
| Per the article, the chain was stupid heavy because it was
| gym/weight training stuff, he was tossed and pinned to the
| machine where he suffocated, he died at the hospital.
| ptruesdell wrote:
| No, he died the next day, following multiple heart attacks.
| psadri wrote:
| Metal detector + gate that denies entry if it detects metals?
| noja wrote:
| Wasn't this the guy who entered the MRI room without
| authorisation?
| riffic wrote:
| most necklaces are metallic are they not?
| chihuahua wrote:
| There's also hippie stuff with hemp twine and wooden beads,
| plus candy necklaces.
| wtcactus wrote:
| This is a sad episode, but you can see it in the language quoted
| from the wife's victim, that she already has an eye in some
| lawsuit to get money out of this.
|
| "It was also not the first time that the employee had seen her
| husband's weight that he used for training, she said."
|
| "She claimed an employee and her husband previously "had a
| conversation about it before: 'Oh that's a big chain'"."
|
| "I'm saying, 'Could you turn off the machine?" she said. "Call
| 911. Do something. Turn this damn thing off!'"
|
| This is really so sad, reminds me some facts about ancient Roman
| history and how everyone kept trying to sue somebody else for
| some easy money.
| lordnacho wrote:
| Why does the magnet always pull rather than push?
| tsoukase wrote:
| Such MRI accidents are like falls of airplanes: extremely rare
| relative to the thousands (millions) of successful attempts.
|
| By the way, a much larger responsibility for CT/MRI centers
| remains a patient's allergic reaction to the contrast medium
| infused intravenously.
| t1234s wrote:
| I've been in a Zone II area waiting before and was surprised how
| easy it would be for an unauthorized person to get close to a 6T
| machine. The only thing preventing access was a plastic stop
| sign.
| racl101 wrote:
| That was a brutal story that raises way too many questions. So
| many that it tires the brain.
|
| Tragedy all around. Feel bad for that lady.
| jayd16 wrote:
| So like, why aren't there metal detectors on the doors going into
| these rooms?
| supportengineer wrote:
| Warning signs, eyeballs, reading, and common sense are
| sufficient most of the time.
| jayd16 wrote:
| Clearly not. Feels like you'd want a metal detector tied to a
| door lock.
| snvzz wrote:
| "Most of the time" is not good enough.
|
| Door should only open if no metals detected.
| wtcactus wrote:
| Why though? Why are we going to force society to spend
| hundreds of millions of dollars in equipment, wasted time
| and personal costs, to avoid a one in a million possibility
| that someone not caring about clear warning signs gets
| injured?
| throwmeaway222 wrote:
| why doesn't the MRI machine do magnetic field checks to make sure
| there isn't some anomalous metal anywhere near it - and do near
| instant shut down if so?
| kccqzy wrote:
| Because shutting down and restarting it is a >$10,000 event.
| ars wrote:
| It can't shut down fast. You can only shut it down by boiling
| away the liquid helium, and all the energy of the magnet turn
| into heat to boil it.
|
| It's a slow process. There is an enormous amount of energy in
| that magnet which has to go somewhere.
| ourmandave wrote:
| It's stupid, but I read the headline and can't help but hear the
| Terminator theme in my head.
| jijji wrote:
| its straight out of a scene from Final Dedtination [0] (currently
| in the theaters), I guess this guy never saw that recent film lol
|
| [0] https://youtu.be/9fUB-nDZT8Q?si=ENx3IP27TVRlioKP
| xico wrote:
| Maybe if we reverted back to the original Nuclear Magnetic
| Resonance name, people would understand it could be a bit more
| dangerous that just an image when we are not careful.
| sigmoid10 wrote:
| Misleading title.
|
| >he was wearing a 20lb (9kg) chain with a lock that he used for
| weight training.
|
| That is not what any reasonable person would call a "necklace."
| Yes, metal and MRIs don't mix well, but normal jewellery won't be
| able to generate enough force to kill you. It might actually be
| more dangerous due to inducted currents heating the thing up and
| giving you burns.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| Somebody told me that they knew of a case where a hospital porter
| tried to take a shortcut through the MRI room with a metal gas
| cylinder. Apparently it made quite a hole in the wall.
| Aurornis wrote:
| For anyone wondering why they didn't just turn the magnet off
| immediately: Quenching the magnet is not instant. From what I've
| read, it can take 30 seconds to multiple minutes for the magnetic
| field to dissipate after pressing the button.
|
| Also, the person wearing the 20lb chain was not the patient.
| There was an access control failure (someone peeking their head
| into the room?) combined with the extraordinary amount of metal
| resulting in a lot of pull.
| fluidcruft wrote:
| A gofundme setup by his step-daughter for funeral costs says he
| was stuck to the magnet for over one hour. Which if accurate
| seems like the timescale for ultimately being quenched but
| after a lot of indecision about punching the button. Probably
| they waited for EMS to arrive and be screened etc and they had
| to decide etc.
| ElijahLynn wrote:
| s/Man wearing metallic necklace dies after being sucked into MRI
| machine/Man wearing 20lb chain on neck dies after being sucked
| into MRI machine
| mdavid626 wrote:
| Final Destination Bloodlines?
| mdavid626 wrote:
| Can't the magnetic field be turned off? Big red button?
| wayeq wrote:
| > According to the US Food and Drug Administration, MRI machines
| have magnetic fields that will attract magnetic objects of all
| sizes
|
| Good thing they sourced that fact, I never would have guessed.
| dannykwells wrote:
| A plot line literally out of a Final Destination movie (the
| newest one). MRI machines are scary!
| hyghjiyhu wrote:
| The machine itself should be able to detect that something
| anomalous is happening to the magnetic field as it is doing work
| on the metal item and immediately cut power.
| postalrat wrote:
| MRI machines use a superconducting electromagnet that once
| energized will run forever. The only power it needs is to
| maintain the low temps for the superconductor.
|
| The "OFF" switch vents the coolant (helium) outside the
| hospital so the electromagnet stops superconducting and can
| turn off.
|
| Outside the hospital it would look something like:
| https://www.youtube.com/shorts/krMbFT0Ums0
| DanielleMolloy wrote:
| ,,In the description of the fundraiser, which had raised more
| than $3,300 by Monday morning, Bodden said her mother and the
| technician "tried for several minutes to release him" before
| calling the authorities."
| https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/mri-machin...
|
| Is there information on why they didn't quench?
|
| They teach anyone operating MRI or even sitting by - in the first
| instruction lesson - that if life is at danger in relation to the
| magnet, you quench (=release the helium to stop the magnet).
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