Nuclear Medicine
What is nuclear medicine in healthcare?
Nuclear medicine is a medical specialty that uses radioactive material to assess bodily functions and diagnose and treat diseases. By leveraging radioisotopes, an unstable form of an element that admits radiation, healthcare providers can look inside the body and determine the condition of organs in the body without the need for invasive surgery.
Radioisotopes provide accurate information about organ structure and functions and can detect conditions including cancerous tumors, heart conditions, or kidney dysfunction. This allows healthcare professionals to detect abnormalities early and develop treatment plans that are most likely to be effective.
Nuclear medicine has also helped scientists better understand how certain treatments affect different parts of the body, making it possible to develop more targeted and patient-specific treatments for many medical conditions.
Why is nuclear medicine important to healthcare?
Nuclear medicine is an important part of modern healthcare that plays a key role in detecting, preventing, diagnosing, and treating various diseases and disorders. This medical specialty provides new options for treating cancers and other serious diseases with targeted radiation therapy delivered directly to the tumor while decreasing harm to healthy tissue in the surrounding area. In this way, proactive treatments are available to people who may not be able to access traditional therapy methods due to cost or availability.