Nuclear medicine and radiology are the whole of medical techniques that involve radiation or radioactivity to diagnose, treat and prevent disease. While radiology have been used for close to a century, "nuclear medicine" began approximately 50 years ago. Today, about one-third of all procedures used in modern hospitals involve radiation or radioactivity. An estimated 10 to 12 million nuclear medicine diagnostic and therapeutic procedures are performed each year in the U.S. alone. These procedures are among the best and most effective life-saving tools available, they are safe and painless and don't require anesthesia, and they are helpful to a broad span of medical specialties, from pediatrics to cardiology to psychiatry.
While both nuclear medicine and radiology are used as a diagnostic procedure (to determine a patient's health, monitor the course of an illness or follow the progress of the treatment) and as a therapeutic procedure (to treat illnesses), they are different in that in nuclear medicine radioisotopes are introduced into the body internally, whereas in radiology X-rays penetrate the body from outside the body.
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