Heart Patient Test Is Found Alarming at the White House
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BOSTON — Doctors have a new warning for people who get a common test for heart disease: Stay away from the White House.
A letter in today’s issue of the New England Journal of Medicine says people with recent thallium scans can trigger security equipment that picks up radioactivity. They are literally too hot to get into the White House.
Three doctors who wrote the letter said this happened twice to their patients as they tried to take White House tours. Both were briefly detained by the Secret Service.
“When informing patients of the side effects of thallium-201 imaging,” they wrote, “perhaps a warning against visiting the White House soon after the test should be included.”
The thallium scan is used to check the blood supply to the heart.
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