"Veterinarian medicine represents an alternative for a business person to get involved with because it's a cash business." explains Geske.

Other applications for resold medical equipment come care of the industrial sector, Geske says. CT technology is often used in non-destructive industrial applications, such as testing the structural integrity of vessels and pipelines, and more specifically for testing industrial welds. Another option for used medical equipment is international exportation - yet another cash market.


"Perfectly functional equipment is oftentimes exported to parts of the world where new models just aren't affordable, like parts of Russia and South America," says Geske. Other regions, like Africa, are underserved and in more desperate need of important diagnostic equipment. In this case "you might have two or three CT scanners in a country of 15 million, and no MRI technology."

But governmental and environmental-group regulations regarding the export of used medical equipment are growing steadily more stringent, especially on the receiving end. For instance, several countries throughout the world have implemented embargoes against importing used medical equipment. Brazil has such an embargo, and China does as well. This is partly due to the careless and predatory resale of nonfunctional equipment.

"That's why China closed its doors to the US for used equipment," says Geske. "It wasn't rebuilt or refurbished and ended up being junk and never worked."

Uninformed owners of large, complex medical technologies are often in "a quandary" as to what to do with their equipment, but that is not as much of an issue in nuclear medicine. Hebert Marquez is president of Radiation Oncology Services, Inc, a CA-based company providing worldwide installation, parts, service and removal of radiation therapy equipment. Marquez says that some machines, like linear accelerators, do not contain radioactive material, but do produce radiation that may irradiate the machine's depleted uranium shielding, thereby requiring special handling.

"Everything can be recycled except for the DU - the depleted uranium needs to be disposed of properly," says Marquez.

Philotechnics, Ltd. operates out of Tennessee and is one of the relatively few companies licensed to contain and remove radioactive materials from decommissioned nuclear medicine equipment. This process is regulated in part by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).

"Depending upon what state you live in, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has authorized individual states to administer their own rules," says Andy Armbrust, president of Philotechnics. "This is called the agreement state process."

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