I was very surprised to see the headline “Brain scans tell us little we don’t know so far… …Imaging technology has not lived up to the hopes invested in it in the 1990s, according to some critics” in today’s edition of the Taipei Times.
I thought, “WTF?” :fume:
The article originally appeared last week in the New York Times (18 Oct), and just as I suspected, the original headline was quite different: “Can Brain Scans See Depression?”
Why do I care? Because I grew up around CT and MRI scans. My dad and my brother are both neuroradiologists. Glancing at the headline on the upper left corner of the paper (it’s a feature article, so it refers you to page 16) felt practically like a personal affront.
What bugs me is that many readers could gain the impression that Brain Scanning is primarily about psychiatry. It isn’t. The diagnostic imaging that I am familiar with is all about strokes and brain tumors (I’ve heard that up to 80% of cases of a typical imaging unit in the US is this type of work), and now it’s also about heart attacks (Read this article in Time that came out in Asia last month) and non-invasive colonoscopies, too. Unlike most people I know, I have “box seats” to the advances of this technology (interventional neurorad is hot), and it blows me away every time. It’s exciting stuff that I’m excited to share with friends.
All they (the copy editors) pretty much changed were just a few words in the title. And yet, I am amazed at what a difference it could make to the reader. IMO, they ought to print a correction: using brain imaging for studying psychiatric diseases is experimental only - and as for what it was originally intended, it has exceeded expectations :s