[annapurna]

Jack, if I understand correctly, you are asking if you show both the images and the first radiologist's opinions to the second person when asking for a second opinion. Is that correct?

For all of the times that Laura and I have done this, pretty much no, but we do verbally sumarize, if in person, the findings of the first person to read the images. The few times we were sending films off but not accompanying them we split the difference and sent the report about half the time and wrote our own summary about half.

If you really question if the first person had their head on straight or was really looking at your films, don't send the report. Laura once had "pronounced narrowing of the femoral cartilage" on a knee MRI report that clearly to our eye, and other people who could tell a knee from ..., wasn't there. We later found out that the radiologist hadn't really read the film but simply called that based on it being a typical observation of a 40 year old woman. If you look through my back posts, you'll find a large number of rants about bad radiologists. I don't indict all of them, but a bad one is almost as bad for your health as a bad surgeon.

Another note, make sure that the person giving you a second opinion has some idea of what your concern is/might be. If someone is looking for your specific concern, they're more likely to spend the time to make a good call on that concern rather than be distracted by something that isn't as serious medically but is a lot more obvious radiographically. I don't know what your concern is but if you're worried about facets, for instance, but have a degenerated disk, you might need to prompt people a bit to make sure they report on the facet condition rather than focus on the disk.