Again, why aren’t there metal detectors at the entrances to MRI machines everywhere? For the cost of those machines, the cost of a metal detector is peanuts
9 kilograms Necklace?! What kind of necklace is that?
This was not Mr. T.
This was Mr. D Capitated.
Ooh mind you don’t cut yourself on all that edge!
He didn’t see the new Final Destination movie.
The man, 61, had entered the MRI room while a scan was underway
How was that allowed?
he asked the technician to get her husband to help her get off the table.
…while the machine was still working? And isn’t that the job of the technician anyway?
the technician helped her try to pull her husband off the machine but it was impossible.
Those machines have a kill-switch for a reason.
I call this BS or a very incompetent technician.
Plus a Darwin award for the guy.Couple things:
The magnet is ALWAYS on.
The “kill switch” takes about five minutes to actually deactivate the magnet and it costs about thirty grand in helium every time you push it.
Isn’t it an electomagnet?
it costs about thirty grand in helium every time you push it.
Oh, right, i forgot human lives have a price in the US.
The US is an outlier in how it charges prices for healthcare services.
But every country in the world has prices charged for cold liquid helium. It’s very expensive to gather, process, store, and ship, regardless of what kind of health care economics apply in your country.
And in fact, doesn’t the US have most of the world’s supply of helium?
Its a superconducting magnet that cannot be instantly shut off. I am sorry that the physics of this makes you so angry.
Depends on the machine type. Closed bore machines (the vast majority) use supercunducting electromagnets that are surrounded by liquid helium that creates a very strong magnetic field. To demagnetize them requires dumping the helium.
Some open bore machines use electromagnets, but they’re much less common and not as powerful.
So the helium itself becomes magnetized, is that it?
the helium is liquid, which it only is when it is very very cold.
The superconductor will keep it’s magnetic field forever, as long as it’s superconducting, and it will stay superconducting while it is very very cold.There is physically no way (as in, it is simply impossible, due to how our world works, not money, not people, not technology) to instantly “switch off” the magnet.
it needs to go above a certain temperature, to lose it’s superconducting nature, and it needs to do it at a pace that doesn’t dump a GINORMOUS amount of energy in this magnetic field instantly, because that would be even worse.
the fault here is in allowing anyone with any magnetic metal anywhere near an MRI. And whoever let that happen is going to have a very bad week.
No, the liquid helium cools the magnets to the point where they become superconductive. As to how that works exactly, I do not know. I don’t think I have the math for it.
I’m sure he was barely trained and had specific instructions to “never push that button!” When you whole life in the country is tied to your employment, it’s every moron for themselves.
It’s not an electromagnet, it’s a superconducting magnet. And turning it immediately off makes it melt.
It’s both! MRI magnets are electromagnets that are cooled down to 4 Kelvin using liquid helium. Once they reach those low temperatures, they become superconducting. This way, the magnet isn’t gobbling up tons of electricity to stay at the desired field strength. Instead, the liquid helium needs to be replenished occasionally to keep it at superconducting temperature. Source: I work with MRI scanners.
TIL, thanks
Surely 9kg necklace isn’t something you can just sneak around with, how was he allowed to get close enough to an MRI machine in the first place wearing it?
I would need an entourage of physiotherapists if I had the bling to roll with a 9kg necklace.
Imagine how dope my rhymes would be though. A man can dream…
Hospitals aren’t jails or high security government facilities. I could walk around a hospital right now and walk into an MRI room and nobody would physically stop me. I used to work in a hospital and we had a long meeting about signs, because a cleaner didn’t look at the door sign and walked into an MRI room with a metal floor buffer.
So glad to find that Lemmy is even less empathetic than reddit was. Real faith in humanity killer. Shocking how many people decided to comment without touching the article, really proud to be here…
A 6 pound necklace…
1kg =2.2 pounds. more like a 20 pound necklace.
Did no one else read the story? I read it and it sounds moreso the clinic’s fault
The necklace he was wearing was a steel weighted exercise band, not a normal necklace. He’s not flexing his wealth or anything
His wife told News 12 Long Island in a recorded interview that she was undergoing an MRI on her knee when she asked the technician to get her husband to help her get off the table. She said she called out to him.
Seems like the technician was told by the wife to bring her husband in to help her up. The technician/clinic made a mistake by letting in the husband, who didn’t seem properly warned about MRIs no metal policy. The technician also somehow didn’t catch the giant “necklace” he’d be wearing.
The “he wasn’t supposed to be there” seems like a coverup for their mistake, since how else would he have known to go in? Someone must’ve told him to walk into the room, it’s not like he could hear through the door.
Edit: 100% the technicians fault, the technician saw it. It even had a metal padlock.
They’d even discussed his training and the hard-to-miss chain with the MRI technician during their previous appointments, Jones-McAllister said.
“That was not the first time that guy has seen that chain” on her husband, she said. “They had a conversation about it before.”I’m not saying it’s the husband’s fault, but I don’t think it’s 100% on the technician either.
I read it more like she asked the technician to get her husband and called out to her husband who presumably just walked in.
Also, “they discussed the chain on a previous visit” doesn’t really change anything. Depending on how many people that technician sees and when that last visit was, they might’ve just forgotten.
When McAllister entered the exam room with the technician, the machine suddenly “switched him around, and pulled him in,” Jones-McAllister said.
This was part of the other article I linked. It’s a lot of “they said she said” but I’m gonna put more faith in the victim’s word and not the clinic’s.
Thank the gods for you. I was reading these comments thinking I was insane.
Why even wear the stupid necklace when going to the MRI in the first place? Like, how thoughtless and selfish can you be? Always assume you are surrounded by barely-functional morons, especially in the medical field which seems to attract these types of people, and think defensively.
“Geez, I’m going to be near an MRI machine, maybe I’ll wear a 20 pound piece of steel around my neck? Genius! Let’s do it!”
That’s an extremely privileged take. Not everyone knows about what an MRI does. Don’t just judge someone’s education and circumstance like that.
Common sense is that a person should be able to trust the medical professional. If the professional doesn’t properly warn them, how would they know?
RIP Mr T.
That’s some Final Destination shit right there.
One and only one headstone that includes a mention of a big ass magnet as the cause of death in rap format.
Reading more about the story I wonder how much of it is true
You can’t just “walk into an MRI room”, for one
When the MRI is working you definitely can’t just walk in. Nobody is in there because of the radiation, so i doubt they just have an open door policy
Then, when there is an emergency like, you know, someone being strangled with a 9kg necklace on his neck by the machine’s magnetism, you can press the kill switch that will quench the magnet by venting out all cooling liquid. This will damage the machine and is also a very expensive little joke, but it would save the life of that guy. Why didn’t they do that?
It’s a similar story to the guy that went into an MRI with a gun, causing it to fire and kill the guy.
I’m just going through the comments spreading MRI information (source: work with MRI scanners). There is no radiation danger from MRI.
Just a very strong magnetic field that makes having ferrous objects on your person a hazardous thing to do.
I recently tried spreading the word to other MRI folks about the dangers of ‘magnetic eyelashes’, which i learned was a thing from my fiance. Kind of suprised we havent seen any incidents with those, thankfully.
Nobody is in there because of the radiation
What are you saying, there is no radiation in an MRI Scanner. It works with Magnets instead of X-Rays.
Nobody is in there because usually there is only one operator and this guy sits in the next room at his metal computer, which can’t be in the MRI room, looking at the scan results. The doors are closed because MRIs are loud as hell.
What kind of hospital let him get near the room with that kind of metal around his neck? I’ve had to be in several hospitals recently for different imaging issues and every time the MRI is a thing I have to remove everything metal to go past a certain door (escorting my daughter and son for medical reasons). I don’t know who let him anywhere near the room with something that large.
Edit for Clarity: I’ve had to be the one removing all metal even though I’m not the one being scanned. For me to progress beyond a certain part of the hospital toward the MRI I needed to get rid of everything. My children were being scanned, not me. So, I’m not sure what hospital system allowed this man with a 9kg chain get this far deep into the imaging area.
He wasn’t supposed to be in the room. There was a scan in progress when he entered.
Seems to me all they needed was a magnet of equal or greater strength placed opposite of, and perhaps a bit closer to the doorway, to pull intruders away from the MRI room.
His wife told News 12 Long Island in a recorded interview that she was undergoing an MRI on her knee when she asked the technician to get her husband to help her get off the table. She said she called out to him.
Whole thing is heart breaking all around. I feel for the technician who made an honest but very serious mistake. And I’m sure the wife will spend her days regretting asking for help. Just a fucking tragic situation. :/
the technician who made an honest but very serious mistake.
You mean letting someone in while the machine was in operation?
all they needed was a magnet of equal or greater strength
MRI magnets are electromagnets that are supercooled with liquid helium and take hours to start or stop because of the electrical energy that has to be put in or taken out.
So just having a magnet of equal strengh for idiot defense would be a very significant waste of electricity and helium unfortunately
take hours to start or stop
You mean they’re in constant operation the whole shift?
Surely dialed way down in between scans?No, the magnets are just as dangerous when scans aren’t happening. They are always on.
The dectector and the variable field (that induces the localized measurable changes) stop between scans, but the static magnetic field is kept up.
As long as you keep up the superconductitvity there is basically no electrical loss in the coils. Dialing the magnetic field down would require pulling out the energy, and reinjecting new energy to get the field back up. That’s the slow part, because injecting current quickly would heat the coil above superconductivity, leading to a quench.
I’m not sure how energy is withdrawn in the ordinary shutdown procedure, but I expect it is exchanged into heat and vented to the outside air in some way, rather than reinjected into the grid in a usable form. (The latter would require an inverter to turn the DC back into AC synchronized to the grid, probably would increase complexity by too much). So I suspect it would be wasteful too.
But it would be funny
Maybe lockable doors
Idk bc some of the articles seem to be contradicting but apparently the door had a lock and the deck opened it
So many dumb ways to die…
Another Darwin award.
Only if he didn’t have kids.
Yah the guy was 61 so it’s unlikely that Darwin would figure into the consequences.
People misuse the term “Darwin Award” a lot. It doesn’t just mean someone died in a dumb way, it means they died in a dumb way before passing on their genes.
9 fucking kilograms!? For my fellow Americans, that’s almost 20 pounds!
Can you convert that to tennis balls? I can’t do this math on my own
The only units I understand are bananas or bald eagles. Please adjust accordingly
Somewhere between 150 and 160, depending on the tennis balls. Hope this helps
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=9kg+%2F+mass+of+a+tennis+ball
Edit: Additionally, that’s about 63½ European swallows, assuming an average weight of 5 ounces. Given that a European swallow must beat its wings 43 times per second to maintain airspeed velocity, it’d be a proper racket.
Tap for spoiler
Those numbers are from monty python and the holy grail and are very wrong. I am spreading misinformation online.
And if it’s an African swallow?
Not covered in the film and I refuse to get my information anywhere other than Monty Python. The mass of an african swallow is therefore unknowable.
It’s a fair cop
Society is to blame
I’m upset that I can only like this once.
It’s seventy-nine sticks of butter, plus a pat or two
Aka 6 “knobs,” according to Gordon Ramsey.
aka “the bare minimum”
I used robots and the answer was 160 tennis balls, which is actually much less than I expected.
I feel like someone should have noticed. I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen someone wearing a twenty pound necklace.
I always knew Roughneck McGee would meet a tragic end. Ironically he wasn’t even wearing his BIG necklace.
As if my claustrophobia wasn’t enough reason to irrationally strongly dislike the idea of needing to get an MRI again…
Dude was wearing a 20lb chain while his wife was getting an MRI.
She freaked, and yelled for him, and he ran into the room while the machine was still on and fucking died.
This is 100% their fault, I could almost see an argument that the door needs a lock to prevent idiots with 20l s of metal around their neck from running in, but you don’t want to lock everyone out in case there’s an issue.
There is a lot of conflicting information in the articles im finding about this incident, from her shouting and him running in to him entering the room with the technician, and the technician knew about the chain and had commented on it.
Lmk if you need some examples, but theres a lot.
Im (cynically) inclined to believe that the hospital were the first to give statements and did a quick its-not-our-fault response. Then more people were interviewed. Ill always side with the working class (imo everyone who is not ruling class) rather than the corporations. And in the US the hospital is a corporation for sure.
There’s some gross racial spin surrounding this too, see pic below. It was a weighted padlock steel necklace for his weight training, not whatever is implied by yahoo.
That door should absolutely be locked while in operation. That door being forced open should be an e-stop event.
Someone could walk in there with a firearm or a bowey knife or anything.
Just for your information, the machine, meaning the magnet, is ALWAYS on.
Surely dialed down in between scans?
No. They are usually superconducting magnets in persistent mode:
No it is only turned off during maintenance or by an emergency kill switch.
Unless something gets stuck. Then it is shut down and restarted after the thing is removed. Takes hours though, I think the startup was four hours.
They had that happen at the hospital my father worked at, the cleaning lady brought in a stool with steel legs. They tried to remove it by force first, but four men could not do it.
Huh, I thought this was nonsense, but googling proved you’re right. Very cool TIL!
I’m just thinking about the poor woman. She’s forever going to be haunted with the knowledge that she was the one who called him into the room, and thus led to his death. His decision to come in wasn’t thought out, but that probably won’t relieve her feelings of guilt for having called him in. Such a tragic story.
Uh she was in the room likely still on the bed laying down considering the story given. So like she’ll have some rowdy memories of dude getting mushed into a machine a speed then slowly suffocate if they weren’t lucky enough to hit their head really really fucking hard.
She’s not going to have one whit of self awareness. I may be going out on a limb here, but it doesn’t sound like he was exactly the sharpest bulb in the ocean, and her reported cry to “turn off” the MRI (despite the repeated screenings you get prior to an MRI, warnimg patients about metal) indicate she isn’t either. She’s 100% gonna blame the provider and sue, adding to the rising cost of healthcare.
This is a really unempathetic response. I know shit’s tough right now and there are a lot of fools out there, but I beg you to at least try to give the benefit of the doubt and try to think through why people might do the things they do, especially when it’s someone enduring a personal tragedy that’s being publicly scrutinized. Think about the poor old woman who had hot coffee spilled on her crotch at a drive through and endured agonizing disfiguring burns - McDonald’s ran a campaign to paint her as a scammer and opportunist when she had done nothing wrong at all.
Most people don’t intentionally endanger themselves or their loved ones and they are usually very deferential to authority, especially in medical settings. There’s nothing to indicate this was any more than a miscommunication involving a heavily blinged-out guy who did nothing wrong. The MRI folks didn’t think to brief him because he wasn’t in the danger zone. His wife called for help. Maybe a very observant doctor could have noticed the guy’s jewelry and gave him a warning. Maybe the wife could have recalled that her husband was wearing metal before calling for him. Maybe the doctors could have better screening procedures for people in the waiting area, or better procedures to control access to the MRI room. I can’t say based on the available information that anyone lacks self awareness or did anything obviously wrong here. Sometimes a lot of coincidences line up to make something terrible happen.
Aren’t you just a shining beacon of logical, data-driven level-headedness. The fuck is she supposed to do, mentally recite each sign she saw on her way in as her spouse is being crushed before to determine if her request is feasible? Crawl out of the MRI, past her dying partner, and go read the manual to see if the MRI has an emergency stop capability before asking the technicians to intervene?
I wish you the best in your future human interactions. I hope very few of them are life-threatening because clearly, you’ll be of no help if you deem the situation avoidable or deem help unlikely to be successful.
His wife told News 12 Long Island in a recorded interview that she was undergoing an MRI on her knee when she asked the technician to get her husband to help her get off the table. She said she called out to him.
Where does it say he ran in? I Kean, what you say sounds right, but this doesn’t read like “freaking out”
Edit: Sounds like she did not freak out, but called to him to help her stand up after it was complete (bad knee), but before he was authorized to enter. This seems more like an honest mistake and tragedy. https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/20/health/mri-machine-death-long-island
You could put an airlock like metal detector door that only opens the second door, if the first door is closed and there’s nothing magnetic inside. People could still go in quickly in emergencies, but nothing that makes it worse can enter.
As much as the machines cost, something like that wired up with a metal detector so that if the machine is on and there’s metal in the airlock it will never open would actually be a good solution…
But it would take a society that values human life and absence of suffering over money. Because like someone else pointed out, the hospital ain’t the one paying to fix the machine.
Maybe Canada would be interested?
This basically never happens. You want to spend billions guarding against humanity stupidity? Good luck with that.
But it would take a society that values human life and absence of suffering over money.
🙄
MRI’s are still plenty dangerous when they aren’t scanning(“on”). The magnets don’t ever turn off unless you release all the helium which is typically a last resort. They can do it slowly for servicing but it’s costly or rapidly for emergencies but it usually trashes things.
Seems like the simplest solution is having a locking observation booth. Family can watch from the booth or go to the waiting room. This doesn’t prevent staff from responding to anything and actually keeps the family out of the way if there is an emergency. No high tech gizmos required. Are they go to like it? Probably not. Then off to the waiting room.
Thanks for the info!
Honestly tho, it’s pretty crazy they let dude roam around a hospital with 20lbs of chain around his neck. That’s literally a deadly weapon.
I don’t care what story he gave, he should have been told to leave it in his vehicle.
i wonder if he had neck pain, to carrying that much weight on his neck.
idk, maybe the hospital has insurance for idiocy. But the people that broke it almost certainly can’t afford an MRI machine, so they ain’t paying.
You could spend billions to implement crazy solutions for every possible scenario.
Or you could just tell the guy not to go in there.
“When you make something idiot-proof, the world builds a better idiot.”
You can idiot proof anything but the world just makes better idiots
That would not cost billions. Not even close. It would certainly be far cheaper than the cost of repair.
Did you forget that thousands of hospitals exist just in the US? Or at least did before 2025.
Not all of them have MRI machines, and regardless of its cheaper than repairing them.
Hundreds probably do though. I don’t know. I’ve never heard of anything like this happening. I think it’s probably exceedingly rare. I had an MRI and the number of times I heard and read the warnings about metal was exhausting. It feels almost impossible that someone could not know about that specific danger.
That would not cost billions. Not even close. It would certainly be far cheaper than the cost of repair.
“I have no idea what I’m talking about so I’ll just assume everything is cheap and easy”
Nah, let them stupids die. I don’t want to risk non idiots lives for the chance of saving a moron.
I apologize if im completely misunderstanding, but what “non idiots” are at risk, in what circumstances? Shouldn’t there always be a tech?
No apology necessary.
There are emergencies that could happen anywhere, including in an MRI room. Dealing with emergencies, ease of ingress and egress is paramount.
The proposed solutions would hamper access to these rooms during emergencies, putting patients and techs in harms way (the non idiots), in the name of preventing a moron from giving themselves a Darwin award.
I think it would be a net negative, ie. more people would die/get hurt trying to make an idiot proof enclosure.
Metal detector on the door to the room.
Don’t forget to pay the repairing fee for the machine
