As concerns the lack of knowledge among those radiological technicians in the health care center, I must come to their defense if ever so slightly. Those folks typically attend a two year junior college. While they do have to take a semester of anatomy and physiology, that's about as rigorous a science curriculum as most will encounter. They are often taught little more than how to operate machines. While I'll concede that such a course of study in what I'd like to think of as a normal human consciousness would spark an interest in exactly why the machines work and through what methods, my 54 years on earth have demonstrated to me that what I would like to think is normal human consciousness, rationality and curiousity is far from the reality of the state of the species. (Aside: I've apparently had this view for a very long time. We recently unearthed a paper I'd written at the age of 25 on education. My conclusion read, in part, "Illich's call for a return to an educational system similar to the one incorporated by the early Greeks is most appealing to those of us who place a high value on education. ... I, however, remain unconvinced that society as a whole is interested in much more than having enough to eat and procreating." In the subsequent 29 years there hasn't been much to disuade me from the idea that I'd gotten it about right at 25.)

No, most of those technicians are just making the rent, unconcerned with the implications of how they do that. But here I see a more sinister plot by not the technicians themselves, but of our idiotic idea that the delivery of healthcare should be a for-profit endeavor. Training a technician to the most limited set of skills possible means hospitals and laboratories can hire those techs at fractions of what it would cost to educate a scientist as to the priciples of operation and then train them how to operate the machines. A scientist would expect and deserve a higher salary. That would mean less for the now legally required not-contributing-but-still-demanding-a-profit crowd. That is something we simply cannot have in this country.