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Comment by hellofunk | Hacker News Reader

Singapore's medical community scares me a little bit. Despite having implanted metal in my body, an orthopedic surgeon wanted to give me an MRI anyway. It's completely absurd, I got a second opinion and fortunately found a doctor who agreed that would be extremely dangerous. It's true that the first doctor did not cost that much; it's also true I got what I paid for.

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A lot of metal implants(most?) are safe for MRIs so your original doctor who did the implant and was aware of its composition was possibly correct and your second one was possibly just happy to agree with you.

Dude, that is most definitely not true. It is true that implants being done today often contain metal that could be safe for future MRIs, but implants from more than just a few years ago are generally very dangerous. In my case my implant is not at all safe, and the surgeon absolutely should've known that. There is a general sense of ignorance among lots of medical community there for some reason.

Interesting what is your implant made of that it is definitely not safe?

It's a standard pacemaker. There's the device itself and then the wires to go to the heart. Any surgeon with half a brain should know you don't go anywhere close to an MRI with that. And for all of his misguided advice that could've threatened my life, I still had to pay him of course. He never did any research or checking on my particular model to even see if there was a danger or not. Turns out, the danger is extreme.

Ah right. Just realized I read your original post wrong. I read it as saying the orthopedic surgeon implanted metal in your body. There isn't much they'd implant that isn't MRI safe.

For a pacemaker in an MRI, it's not being made of metal by itself that's unsafe, it's that the rapidly changing magnetic fields during the scan may cause it to malfunction. But not looking up the MRI conditions under which a device is safe is definitely bad practice. http://www.medtronic.com/us-en/healthcare-professionals/prod...

Sorry mate, this is not true except maybe for very recent implants.

I may not be understanding how you're categorizing the failure modes of a pacemaker in an MRI. Here's a review that describes a lot of what can go wrong.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4475571/

I'm not talking about the failure of the device, I'm talking about the dangers of a MRI magnet ripping the metal out of your body. These are very real dangers for nearly all pacemakers, with the exception of those that are being developed now and some that are implanted extremely recently. But most of the pacemakers in use around the world were not installed today.

No surgeon should be casually dismissing these risks to a patient without getting any extra information at all.

Can you get metal implants which are safe for MRIs?

Anything that's not affected by magnets, I suppose. Titanium should do it.

And most surgical stainless steels.

Also it's pretty easy to detect if someone has a large piece of ferromagnetic metal inside them or not.

I believe most surgical steel is fine. I have a permanent retainer in my mouth and have no issues getting an MRI. The only problems would be if I need an MRI of my head, the metal could cause distortions in the image.

With that said, tell your doctor and more importantly tell the MRI tech about all possible metal in your body.

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