Patrick V. McMahon, M.D. on When MRI's are Necessary
The MRI as the story suggests, is an excellent diagnostic tool. The only difficulty is that MRI%u2019s are very expensive. You have to be careful about over diagnosing spinal problems with people who have conditions that are often asymptomatic. For example, If you have a 100 people walking down the street, aged 50 with no complaints of back pain, over half of them will have bulging discs, herniated discs, or spinal arthritis. Yet they may not have any symptoms. So you have to correlate with the patients symptoms.
If you are not dealing with somebody who had a recent injury, an infection or tumors, often physical therapy is the primary modality to see if you can make the person better. If you can, then you certainly don’t need to proceed to an MRI. But if someone is not improving with therapy, or there is a question of a past injury, the possibility of a tumor, or a recurrent herniated disc from a prior surgery, then certainly an MRI is a very reasonable study to obtain.
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