From Cotonou to Algiers: why nuclear medicine
Nuclear medicine is rarely chosen by chance. The story of a choice — a technical, mathematical, rare discipline — and of the detour through Algiers it took to get there.
When the time came to choose a specialty, most of my classmates turned toward familiar disciplines, taught and practised in Cotonou. I looked elsewhere.
Nuclear medicine held me for what it demands. It is a medicine of images and arithmetic: you give a tracer, you measure what becomes of it in the body, and you read the result in the light of physics. Nothing is settled at a glance; you have to look at everything before you decide — a reflex I find again, oddly enough, at a chessboard as much as in front of a program that refuses to run.
The detour through Algiers
The trouble was that, at the time, there was no specialty training pathway in Benin. To train meant to leave. So I went to Algiers to specialize: scintigraphy, PET imaging, iodine-131 therapies, thyroid and myocardial work, radiation protection for patients and staff. As of 2026, I am at the end of that training.
That detour is no small detail. It says something about nuclear medicine in West Africa: rare, valuable, still to be established. That is exactly why it interests me. There is everything to build — the practice, the teaching, the tools — and that is what I intend to do, in Benin.