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!
I feel like someone should have noticed. I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen someone wearing a twenty pound necklace.
Can you convert that to tennis balls? I can’t do this math on my own
I… want to see that 9 kg necklace. I mean, sounds like it’s just a big-ass chain, but if so, how did it not throw up red flags all around letting this guy wear it around that machine.
It wasnt a necklace…
It was a literal metal chain, like steel. Not a gold cuban link chain or something with a huge medallion a rapper would wear.
Apparently this idiot just lived everyday with a 20lb length of chain around his neck for “weight training”. The article mentions it was “a topic of discussion” on a prior visit, so it wasn’t a one time thing.
The type of person to do that, is 100% the type of guy to run into an active MRI like he could do anything. Theres no logical thinking going on, and an outright refusal to listen to qualified medical advice. Like, they make weighted vests, at least do that instead of putting all that weight on your neck.
Yeah, there was a guy in my town who would run around with one of these around his neck. Similar type of idiot. He would actually run by the strength training gym and gloat to us that we were wasting our time lol, insisting that all we had to do was run around with a big chain.
Hearing about this news story now I wonder if some influencer somewhere started a trend. People love feeling like they found “the secret”
It has all the Hallmarks…
Starts with something based in science, but never goes past surface logic and ignores lots of existing and safe options for the most visible and attention grabbing method despite the serious medical flaws from this method.
Even if you stay away from 1.5 tons magnets, that’s going to fuck your posture up before it translates to muscular gains.
9kg is around 20 pounds. what, did he have a kettlebell as a pendant?
the answers to all your questions lie in the article you didn’t read
The article doesn’t really answer much about the necklace though. I want to see a picture of it and understand why the fuck someone would wear it. Like “for weigh training” but what the fuck is he exercising on a random day in the hospital.
Great! Could you kindly extract them to further our article-non-reading habits?
how did it not throw up red flags all around letting this guy wear it around that machine.
He wasn’t allowed in the room.
His wife panicked in the MRI, he charged into the room he was told not to go Into.
The wife asked to see her husband. I don’t think the blame rests solely on the couple. The nurse should’ve stepped in. I’m also not sure why there wasn’t a emergency stop button.
There was on one that I’ve been in, not sure about this one.
From my understanding, when an MRI is emergency stopped it doesn’t stop immediately, and it causes a lot of damage, so staff are less likely to use it in an emergency. Stupid, yes. But when you’re worried about getting fired for hitting a button, you’re less likely to think of a situation as an emergency. You would think “chain strangling a man” constitutes an emergency though…
As for the staff not stopping the guy making a beeline for the door with more than just words, I’m not sure. I would prefer staff tackle me to the floor rather than let me blithely walk to my doom. Of course I’m only in my 30s…
The hospital is absolutely partly to blame, especially if they didn’t properly convey the danger beforehand. All 3 hospitals I’ve recieved an MRI from have been pretty insistent about making sure I have no metal on or around me before I go in the doors though.
I’d say it’s about 60/40 on the hospital.
Imagine the scene from her POV. She’s claustrophobic and having a meltdown because of all the hums and bangs and then her husband comes running in only to get pulled into the machine she is already stuck inside of. He’s screaming and can’t get pulled free while she is being pushed even harder into the machine she so desparately wants free from - by her husband who is quickly suffocating to death
It was a knee MRI. She wasn’t stuck inside it, she just wanted her husband to help get her off of the table instead of just the technician.
Still a horrible scene though, but not quite as horrific as your first imagining.
While you wrote an interesting narrative, if you read the article the story is nothing like this, and even from her point of view would have been nothing like this.
She had asked the nurse to call her husband to help her up from the table. She called out his name and he ran in while the machine was still going.
He was pulled into the machine and was freed eventually but suffered multiple heart attacks after being pulled off the machine. The heart attacks are what killed him in the end in a hospital bed far from the MRI machine. He definitely did not suffocate.
There probably wasn’t any screaming. MRIs exert thousands of pounds of force at close range. You can imagine what thousands of pounds of metal would do to a neck.
thousands of pounds of force at close range
So tragic, jesus. Also, it was obviously stupid, but in his defense he probably went into fight or flight and wasn’t thinking. Unfortunately he paid for it with his life.
He went in to help her stand up from the machine.
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.
Metal detector on the door to the room.
this seems like the obvious solution to me and it’s kinda wacky that it’s not already standard, just have a loud as fuck alarm go off if metal goes through the first door leading to the general scanner area.
just gotta have enough distance between the detector and the scanner, so there’s time for people to intervene.
Just for your information, the machine, meaning the magnet, is ALWAYS on.
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.
You could spend billions to implement crazy solutions for every possible scenario.
Or you could just tell the guy not to go in there.
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.
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?
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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.
Then the door will always be locked, unless the MRI is being serviced, as the magnet is always active. Kinda kills the point of the machine, no? That said they could put in more safeguards for sure. Though you would think all the signs on and near the door, and the extensive explanation you get, would be enough. But here we are.
No, signs aren’t enough obviously. This is definitely not the first time we’ve heard of stories of people coming in with guns, chairs what have you.
It’s not everyday, so maybe it’s not warranted… But if you look at the things we apply security to we secure against a lot of things that never happen
Given the apparent danger of the device. There’s still plenty of options for security.
How about a set of man trap doors and a metal detector. The outside pair is unlocked. When you step through the metal detector, If a safe amount of metal is detected the outside door is locked and the inside doors unlock.
You don’t need a very sensitive metal detector The extra construction around two doors, and a small door controller / locks would be super insignificant to the price of the machine.
If you use cam locks the emergency egress would still be fine. Maybe you’d need to sense the outer door being shut to make sure somebody doesn’t hold the door for someone else.
Was the necklace even related to the death? It says he had a “series of heart attacks” which doesn’t sound like something caused by being pulled toward the machine.
If the necklace impeded blood flow or even put a lot of strain on his circulatory system then it could have caused his heart attacks.
Sounds like it wasn’t him being pulled towards the machine that killed him, it was being pinned against the machine for a prolonged period of time.
Easy solution : have a pure gold necklace, since gold isn’t magnetic
Moving fields, eddy currents still apply.
Copper isn’t magnetic either https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yu1uRvErM80
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. :/
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.
i think the easiest way to think about it is like a very well insulated freezer, it takes hours to defrost it and then it takes hours to build the cold back up.
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.
