A video has provided terrifying insight into the case of a 61-year-old man who died after being ‘snatched’ by an MRI scanner last week (16 July).
Keith McAllister died from the injuries he sustained in the Nassau Open MRI medical facility in New York after he entered the room with the MRI scanner in it to be with his wife Adrienne Jones-McAllister while she was getting her knee scanned.
She’d asked the technician to bring her husband in to help her get up and Keith had been wearing a ‘large metallic chain’ around his neck, which resulted in him being ‘drawn into the machine‘.
MRI stands for ‘magnetic resonance imaging’ and uses a very strong magnet, meaning it can become a very dangerous thing when metal is involved.
Adrienne said her husband was allowed into the room despite wearing a 9kg metal necklace and the machine ‘pulled him in’, and that she and the technician could not pull Keith away from it.
Keith McAllister and his wife Adrienne (News 12)
The emergency services were called to reports of a man having a ‘medical episode’ after becoming caught in the machine, and an update two days later said he had ‘succumbed to his injuries and was declared deceased by a hospital physician’.
The powerful magnetic forces used in an MRI scanner can be seen in footage of people testing one with various metal objects.
In a video of people showing just how strong an MRI scanner’s magnetic forces are, a woman holds up a metal object which is sucked inside at some speed the moment she lets go.
Footage of people demonstrating the power of an MRI scanner show just how strong they are (YouTube/Science Explained Official)
A man can be seen throwing a metal chair inside the scanner and his efforts to pull it back out again don’t quite succeed as the magnet proves stronger than human strength.
Other studies on their power indicate they are ‘strong enough to fling a wheelchair across a room’.
Further footage from people demonstrating the pulling power of an MRI scanner have shown they can easily draw in and sometimes break metal objects they attract.
In one particularly horrific incident a 40-year-old Brazilian man died after taking a loaded gun into a room with an MRI scanner.
He had accompanied his mother to a medical appointment and kept a pistol tucked into his waistband, the MRI had pulled it out of his trousers and the weapon discharged, shooting the man in the stomach.
The man had a licence to carry the weapon, but officials said he had kept it on him despite several warnings from hospital staff to leave any and all metal objects behind before entering the room.
Back in 2001, a six-year-old died after an MRI drew a metal oxygen tank across the room.
MRI scanners are considered to be thousands of times more powerful than your common fridge magnet, so while they are incredibly useful medical devices, there are dangers to be aware of.