Filmjacket.com - News

Back after a long absence

I am back after a long absence. The end of the fellowship, the big move, the new job, and endless paperwork associated with all of the above have put a damper on things.

The first thing I have to say is that filmjacket needs to either go away or reinvent itself. Going away seems easy; reinventing the website is hard. Yet, "we do things not because they are easy, but because they are hard." Time will tell if this will be a success story.

Until the next update,

Webmaster.

Amateur Medical Association wants in on imaging

Americans for Responsible Imaging blog recently focused on an important issue. Apparently, it is "fair" for non-radiologists to practice radiology!

To me, AMA resolution 208, in essence, reads that even though there are legitimate concerns over increased utilization rates and lawmakers are effecting measures to curtail self-referral, AMA chooses to completely ignore the issue and would like to give medical imaging a good old college try. In fact, multiple medical specialty societies can now apply appropriateness / practice guidelines as well as technical standards!

I wonder if, similarly, internists may soon wish to practice surgery or radiation oncology.

Read the full post here.

Amazon Kindle review

I just stumbled upon an excellent review of Amazon Kindle. This review also comments on reading radiology-related material on the Kindle. Apparently, it works pretty well!

In addition to this review, there are several other interesting articles on Not Totally Rad blog.

So you want to get a radiology job?

Good! Know what you are getting. Ask the right questions and you shall be rewarded.

This document contains the questions I used during my job search. It is free for everyone to use, change and distribute at will.

To do or not to do a fellowship?

In retrospect,�my answer�is NO.

One reason is that there is tremendous opportunity cost asociated with it. Let's say a fellow earns $50,000 during his training. As an attending, he or she�would have made, say, $350,000. The difference, $300,000, even if taxed to the maximum, will be at least $150,000. That money, put in an index fund with an average annual return of 10%, will grow to $4,006,214.64! That's how much that person will be missing from his retirement account. Of course, appropriate taxes (right now, it's 15% long term capital gains tax)�will apply, but that still leaves more than 3.4 million. Would you pay that much for fellowship training?

Another reason is that a fellow forgets a large part of general radiology during fellowship. If he or she gets a job in academics, this may be sustainable; however, it is not adequate for private practice, where one may be asked to do everything. The well-paying jobs with long vacations are still in private practice, although that may be changing.

Returning to opportunity cost, a year of life as a young person will be severely limited due to fatigue and time constraints associated with high workloads that usually occur in fellowhsip.

I am starting to believe that we've been sold a bill of goods. We don't need a fellowship. After the oral boards, we're fairly well prepared for working as an attending. Yes, there is room to grow,�but some experience as well as occasional self-directed reading and looking will largely take care of that.

The future of filmjacket.com

I have finally come to terms with my lack of interest in updating this website with any reasonable frequency. It's been 2 years and the site nad a good run. I learned many things about web design and now can put up a site in about 10 minutes. I began work on other projects that presently hold my interest; filmjacket.com will remain up with minor changes and I will update it essentially whenever I feel like it.

If someone out there has more enthusiasm than I do, I will consider all reasonable offers.

In the meanwhile, please visit my investment blog. It is recent but already has some good pointers for beginning investors!

New investment blog

Recently, I took an interest in investing money and did a great deal of reading and research. Having invested some money and having done noticeably better than S&P 500 index, I decided to organize the information I gathered in the form of a blog.

The new investment blog is temporarily located HERE. It has only a few posts so far; if�things go�well, it will get its own domain name.

More radiology t-shirts

The radiology gifts section has not been updated for a while. This is because it is fairly time-consuming to design these products, and I am hoping to return to this after the academic year is over. However, I found 3 designs that have been sitting on my hard drive for months and decided to show them off. I am particularly proud of the "bremsstrahlung" graphic:) Click "read more" to see the pictures and if you like them, let me know.

Return after an absence

Dear readers,

I have not written much for a while. The reasons for this are numerous - for one, I found my first job! Now that the contract is signed and I know what I am doing after training, I can return to work on�filmjacket.

Fellowship continues to be an arduous experience, but there are a few things in store. I had previously given hints about new developments at filmjacket.com, but some of those projects had to be shelved in partially-done state. They are, however, going to make an appearance some time soon!

Stay tuned.

What is magnetic susceptibility?

I often use the term "magnetic susceptibility artifact" and I like to think that I understand what it means; however, concepts can always be more clear.

In short, magnetic susceptibility is a degree to which a material is affected by a magnetic field. Magnetic susceptibility artifact is a local distortion of magnetic field caused by close positioning of materials with different magnetic susceptibilities.

The concept of magnetic susceptibility and related artifacts, as well as their relevance to radiology are quite well explained in a post from Musculoskeletal and Orthopedic MRI blog.