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Human Use of New Hospital’s Equipment Makes Horse Sense

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Reuters

When residents of this town want the best medical care money can buy, they will soon be able to go to the local veterinary hospital.

It has some of the region’s most advanced medical equipment, including a magnetic resonance imager.

On Monday, an 80-year-old woman will be the first human to be diagnosed on the MRI at Washington State University Veterinary Teaching Hospital. Spokesman Charlie Powell says the machine is just like MRIs for humans except that it has a weight capacity of more than 500 pounds.

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Powell said the arrangement just seemed logical because “we were building a new teaching hospital, and two of the local community hospitals were planning to invest in their own new technology.”

Human patients are promised the machine will have been sanitized after the last animal. And to prevent a mixed crowd in the waiting room, animal and human scans will not be interspersed.

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