Mayo Clinic Health Manager
Get free personalized health guidance for you and your family.
Get Started
About our e-newsletters
- Free e-newsletters
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- We do not share your e-mail address
Housecall, our weekly general-interest e-newsletter, keeps you up to date on a wide variety of health topics with timely, reliable, practical information, recipes, blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts and more. Our biweekly topic-specific e-newsletters also include blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts, and other useful information that will help you manage your health.
Housecall Archives
Mayo Clinic Housecall
Stay up to date on the latest health information.
What you get
- Free weekly e-newsletter
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- Recipes, tools and other helpful information
- We do not share your e-mail address
Risks
By Mayo Clinic staffDiagnostic ultrasound is a safe procedure that uses low-power sound waves. Higher power sound waves are used for treatment purposes to heat and even destroy some types of tissue or tumors.
Although ultrasound is a valuable tool, it does have its limitations. Sound doesn't travel well through air or bone, so ultrasound isn't effective at imaging parts of your body that have gas in them or that are obscured by bone. Rather than using ultrasound to view these areas, your doctor may instead order other imaging tests, such as CT or MRI scans, or X-rays.
