Donald Said:

radiologist technologist or nuclear medicine technologist?

We Answered:

Radiologic technologists (the proper term for an x-ray tech) and nuclear medicine technologists attend seperate educational programs. Some nuc. med. programs require you to be a RT before they will accept you into their programs.

At the following site, you can view all of the accredited nuc. med. or RT programs. Be sure the program you attend is on this list. If it is not listed, you will not be able to become a fully licensed RT, upon graduation. Instead, you will have earned a limited permit, and those are nearly worthless.

http://www.arrt.org/index.html?content=h…

As to the RT programs, ycan attend a hospital based program (and earn a certificate), a 2 year college program (AS degree), and even a 4 year college program (BS degree). The hospital based programs are the least expensive, and honestly, I think the education received there is superior. Once you graduate and take your registry exam, no future employer is going to care what type of educational program you went through. All they care about is your license. You can find an accredited RT program at this site. Just search "radiography" and your state...links are provided which will give you additional information on each program (cost, duration of program, contact person):

http://www.jrcert.org/cert/Search.jsp

The American Society of Radiologic Technologists just did a large salary survey, in 2007. The salary varies, depending on your experience, specialties and geographical area. To view, the survey, and see the average salary, for RTs and nuc. med. techs, in your state, you can go to this link:

https://www.asrt.org/media/pdf/research/…

Beth Said:

who knows a good school for nuclear medicine technologist in Los Angeles, CA area? Please !?

We Answered:

Heart's in the 808: USC
UCLA
Loma Linda
Irvine
Mount Sinai
UC San Diego
UC Santa Barbara

--------------------------------------…
Yep, she's just about covered all the good schools for that. Lol

Emma Said:

Is it a bad idea to go to school for Nuclear Medicine Technology?

We Answered:

I am a working certified NMT. Yes, it is a bad idea to go into this field. Sadly, because it is a great field. But there are hundreds of NMTs applying for any job, most job openings are per diem and not even full time, outpatient facilities are being forced to close their nuc programs due to continued cuts in Medicare funding and changing insurance rules. I like my job and am lucky to have one, but I will be forced to change careers in the future, especially after our nearest medical reactor closes in 2016. There are WAY too many students graduating for the jobs available and many techs are graduating to find they need to go right back to school because they cannot get hired. There is an extremely poor job outlook for this career, I recommend you choose something else (not because it's a bad job, it is really great to work with patients and see how much diagnostic value is in the tests). As for alternatives, CT and ultrasound seem to have the most openings at the moment. Medical Technologists are in demand, though I don't think that pays quite what nuc tech makes... nuc techs do pretty well with the salary, but we are basically handling liquid radiation so that makes sense :-) Opthalmic techs, occupational therapists, and sleep techs have some openings. I recommend you do a job search in Allied Health and look thru all the openings to see what is doing best and check out the salary estimates. Diagnostic imaging in general is kind of overrun, but I think Radiographers, CT (an additional certificate you get after either RT or NMT school), and U/S will recover and maintain the fastest. MRI typically cross trains the resident RT so hard to even find openings that are posted, they just do a lateral transfer and RTs get paid less than NMTs anyway so it makes financial sense to the hospital. But if you go on any nuc med forum you will hear all about the job crash for NMTs, so save your tuition money and do something else.

Lois Said:

Nuclear Medicine Technologist?

We Answered:

First off, the job outlook for Nuclear Medicine Technologists is currently very poor, but dont let that discourage you if becoming a technologist is something you really want to do! First thing you want to do is look up institutes that offer a Nuclear Medicine Program. If you are a junior now, I am not 100% sure when this is going to take effect, but soon it will be a requirement that you graduate from Nuclear Medicine with a Bachelors degree and not just an associate. Also the bachelors will get you a higher pay and a bit of an advantage in the job search over those with associates. Make sure the school you find is an accredited and nationally recognized school as there are some out there to claim to offer Nuclear Medicine but arent accredited therefore you would be wasting your money. I went to NMI in Findlay, OH which is a nationally recognized school with some of the big names in Nuclear Medicine either being associated with NMI or coming from NMI. Your college classes will be pretty basic at first with the pre-req classes such as math, english, etc... With the bachelors most programs will require chemistry, ochem/biochem, anatomy, etc, very similar to pre-med majors (which I doubled majored in back in college along with Nuclear Medicine) Once you get accepted the programs schedules will vary from school to school with some having you complete the clinical portion during classes, some before, and some after (i did the class portion first then my clinical portion). The classes can be pretty intense with lots of information to remember for the tests and not to mention the NMTCB or ARRT boards. All in all you would be looking at 4-5 years of schooling total (unless you take summer classes you can cut the total load down and maybe squeak out in 3-4 years..thats what I did). Now for the actual atmosphere of the work, best way to understand it is to go shadow a nuclear medicine department! Most hospital nuc med departments would be more then happy to let you shadow for a couple of days. You cannot be afraid of needles/blood/sick people because you will be starting IVs and doing injections as a regular thing. You will see blood from either doing IVs or even for certain procedures, and of course you will see many sick people and elderly people. Nuclear medicine has really broadened into working oncology to monitor cancer patients. You have to be able to be very discrete with the patients as some will try to get you to tell them results (when legally that would be practicing medicine without a license) so you must be able to dance around the topic of results, even though you can clearly see that the cancer has spread, or that there is a problem somewhere. Dont worry about the exposure to radioactivity as it is quite more then you would usually get exposed, but the department closely monitors your exposure and there are many devices utilized to reduce your exposure.
It is a great field to get into with many new advances and hopefully the Mo generators will soon be fixed so that more Tc-99m will be available to perform more procedures and create more jobs.
Hope this helps!!
If you want any more information you can visit the school I went to at this website. It gives a quick over view of the topics I covered and may be able to answer any additional questions you have http://findlay.edu/academics/colleges/co…

Jonathan Said:

Question about Nuclear Medicine Technologists?

We Answered:

You will not be able to work in medicine if you confuse "accept" and "except".

That being said, people with better degrees do better in medicine, and you can always attend another state's community college.