I’m a secretary for a therapy center and in cleaning out some of our closets we came across a significant quantity of old x-ray films, some dating back 40+ years!
My intention is to use some as durable pattern templates for stained glass, but frankly that will only put a very small dent in the stack.
We’re looking for ideas to re-purpose or reuse these. We will remove all identifying information from the x-rays to protect the privacy of our clients and be HIPAA compliant.
We also have a corresponding quantity of manila envelopes these were stored in, some of which are in great shape, nice and heavy, but x-ray size of course. Any ideas on what we might do with these?
I look forward to your inventive and resourceful ideas
Recycled for content is huge, and you there are services that will deliver a barrell for you to fill.
Be aware that if you have any mammos, you can not legally get rid of them without a death certificate (stupid flipping laws).
If you have any taken of kids, you can’t get rid of them until the kid is 25+ (I think - you will want to check on that one).
Put simply, there are laws about maintenance of health care records that do not always make a lot of sense. Just CYA.
After that, and after you have cut off the corner with the information…
School teachers can use them. My son has a full human in bits and pieces that he takes to school. They are VERY usefull for some teachers. This is slowly being replaced by the powerpoint / digital xray stuff, but old school is still great.
Art schools might find a use for some as well.
I wonder if you could tint the side and back windows of your car with some old xrays?
This isn’t really an answer, but I somewhat recently ran into an article about a guy who collects ersatz records made behind the Iron Curtain that were copied onto x-ray films instead of vinyl record blanks. They look really, really cool.
What are exposed X Rays worth? We had a guy come by here once wanting to buy all our old film to extract the silver out of it. We didn’t sell it, but we have several boxes of the stuff stashed around (not medical). I can’t imagine there being enough silver in them to be worth anything unless you had a lot of them.
The Radiology department at a previous hospital I worked at used theirs for the coolest Halloween decorations ever. They cut out the black backgrounds and used those paper fasteners (the round metal things with the tabs that you bend out to keep papers together) to attach and “joint” the various limbs and parts together, then taped them in their office window where the backlighting showed the neat skeletons.