Medical Issues and Safety
Because human tissues have a very low level of susceptibility to static magnetic fields, there is little mainstream scientific evidence showing a health hazard associated with exposure to static fields. Dynamic magnetic fields may be a different issue, however; correlations between electromagnetic radiation and cancer rates have been postulated due to demographic correlations (see Electromagnetic radiation and health).
If a ferromagnetic foreign body is present in human tissue, an external magnetic field interacting with it can pose a serious safety risk.
A different type of indirect magnetic health risk exists involving pacemakers. If a pacemaker has been embedded in a patient's chest (usually for the purpose of monitoring and regulating the heart for steady electrically induced beats), care should be taken to keep it away from magnetic fields. It is for this reason that a patient with the device installed cannot be tested with the use of an MRI, which is a magnetic imaging device.
Children sometimes swallow small magnets from toys, and this can be hazardous if two or more magnets are swallowed, as the magnets can pinch or puncture internal tissues; one death has been reported.
Read more about this topic: Magnet
Famous quotes containing the words medical, issues and/or safety:
“As we speak of poetical beauty, so ought we to speak of mathematical beauty and medical beauty. But we do not do so; and that reason is that we know well what is the object of mathematics, and that it consists in proofs, and what is the object of medicine, and that it consists in healing. But we do not know in what grace consists, which is the object of poetry.”
—Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)
“I can never bring you to realize the importance of sleeves, the suggestiveness of thumb-nails, or the great issues that may hang from a boot-lace.”
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930)
“A lover is never a completely self-reliant person viewing the world through his own eyes, but a hostage to a certain delusion. He becomes a perjurer, all his thoughts and emotions being directed with reference, not to an accurate and just appraisal of the real world but rather to the safety and exaltation of his loved one, and the madness with which he pursues her, transmogrifying his attention, blinds him like a victim.”
—Alexander Theroux (b. 1940)