Medicine: Atomic Diagnosis

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For most patients, the old-fashioned basal metabolism test is a mild form of torture, but that would be no reason for discarding it if it were a consistently accurate test. The fact is that it is far from reliable, and four Navy researchers have come to the conclusion that in big medical centers with facilities for handling radioisotopes. it should be replaced by the "atomic cocktail."

Since the thyroid is the key organ in metabolism, and since radioactive iodine-131 makes a beeline for the thyroid, a simple check with a scintillation counter held against the throat can show when it is overactive: an overactive thyroid removes more iodine-131 from the blood than a normal one, and this shows in a higher reading on the dial of the counter. Moreover, where the atomic cocktail test was once thought to require a second visit to the laboratory for a reading 24 hours afterward, researchers at the Navy's Radioisotope Laboratory in Bethesda, Md. now find that all the patient need do is swallow a glass of water containing a minute amount of radioactive iodine and sit around for an hour until the technician comes with the scintillation counter.