While it's true that good health is priceless, and cutting corners on health care is risky, there is still much you can do in order to obtain same good value in medical care that you insist upon in other areas of your life.

If you lack a prescription plan that pays for your medications, it's high time you discussed cost of drugs with your doctor. Your doctor's number-one choice in medication for your medical condition might be expensive. There are usually reasonable alternatives that cost less. You should take advantage of your doctor's expertise in estimating trade-offs involved with each of your options.

Apart from prices, your doctor is already balancing a number of important factors in making a drug recommendation. First, of course, drug needs to be medically effective—otherwise, why bother? The doctor also takes into consideration what other medications you are taking, what other illnesses you have, your age, your gender, drug's side-effect spectrum, and also its convenience aspects, like how many times per day it has to be taken and whether or not blood-tests are required to monitor it. A drug that might score high on effectiveness and side-effects might still be inconvenient. An alterative might be both convenient and effective, but pose a higher risk of side-effects.

So truth of matter is that your doctor is already sorting through all sorts of trade-offs in choosing a medication to prescribe. Factoring in prices of alternative drugs just builds on comparing-apples-to-oranges process you are paying your doctor to do for you in first place. But if doctor doesn't know that you lack a prescription plan, he or she might not include cost of drugs in these reckonings and you might be stuck with a prescription that wrecks your budget.

We had skull x-rays which imaged bony brain-case, but not brain itself. We had arteriograms which imaged insides of blood-vessels supplying brain. We had nuclear brain scans which imaged chunks of brain that were recently damaged. We had a particularly nasty test called a pneumoencephalogram (PEG) in which doctor squirted air through a spinal tap needle and encouraged it to bubble around and inside brain by turning patient every which-a-way—including upside-down—while x-ray pictures showed where air could and couldn't go. Finally, most accurate method was not a physical picture at all, but a mind's-eye picture within brain of an examining neurologist. Yet diagnoses still got made and patients did get treated.

CT scans revolutionized practice of neurology. It's not that other methods disappeared (well, yes, PEGs thankfully did disappear) but that CT scans vastly improved accuracy of diagnosis and treatment. Even when CT scans didn't show disease itself (e.g. multiple sclerosis or a fresh stroke) they assisted diagnostic process by proving absence of a brain tumor, abscess or hemorrhage that were also on list of diagnostic possibilities.

CT scans did (and still do) this by sending x-ray beams through head at various angles and collecting x-ray beams on opposite side that were not absorbed by head. Then magic occurs. A series of images appear on a computer monitor or on x-ray film as if head had been run through a giant salami-cutter and slices were laid out flat and in sequence.

On CT pictures different parts of head are displayed in various shades of gray according to how much they absorb x-rays. The skull-bone absorbs x-rays most and shows as whitest component. At other end of gray-scale, watery spaces in and around brain absorb x-rays least and show as blackest components. The brain itself is somewhere in between, showing up in mid-gray range. Abnormal components, like brain tumors and blood-collections, are identified not just by appearing in their own shades of gray, but also by their locations and shapes. Creating a second set of slices after patient receives an infusion of intravenous dye provides an additional dimension to imaging not unlike that provided by older, nuclear scans.