Do healed fractures show on a X-ray?

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I joke about how I’ve never broken a bone despite being quite clumsy. Yesterday I dropped something heavy on my foot and it looked pretty impressive, swollen and bruised really quickly. A friend was here and was icing for me (I’m clumsy but also prettt pathetic when hurt). Anyway I was saying maybe my feet will match now because I have a dent in the long toe bone (probably has a more scientific name) on the other foot. She knows the no brakes thing so said she thought this meant I’d broken it at some point.
Thinking back I have a dent in my shin bone too and it hurt like buggerg for weeks. I also was knocked out falling from a horse that left me with a sore back for months. The shin and back happened when I was a kid and it was just iced at home and then kept moving. So any injury since I was an adult is treated the same.
Could I have broken something not that badly and it’s just healed on its own? I’m not going to waste the nhs time checking but if I went private somewhere could it be seen if it had been broken in the past? It would make me feel better about a lot of whimpering and give me the final ammunition against my mother (not that is ever use it).
Google isn’t clear and suggests there’s a thing called a bone scan but I’m not sure I’m that interested.

I think so.

yes on an xray old brakes show up.

My daughter had an MRI that showed her sore foot had indeed been a break that was now healed.

yes pretty sure they do, new bone formation

calcification innit

or maybe not calcification, ossification

Yes- but realistically you are never going to find out unless you get injured in the same area and need an X-ray for that.

I’m fairly convinced I had several untreated fractures as a child/teen (good reasons for thinking so), and possibly again as an adult (potentially broken rib during serious lung infection). I’ll probably never know for sure tho!

yes
I had a pretty fierce break in a vertebra and was told it wouldn't be x rayed again because it's always going to look the same on an x ray so that wasn't a guide to how it was healing.

Hmm good to know. Also good to know everything I knew about X-rays was wrong but that wasn’t a lot to start with. I thought they were returned to new, but I suppose skin scars as well ...
might investigate the cost of X-rays on holiday to satisfy my own curiosity.

Pretty sure you can't just order x-rays for curiosity's sake. Exposing yourself to unnecessary radiation is beyond foolish.

I have to admit I think I might have a healed fracture in my foot. A wooden bench fell on my foot at school. It was incredibly painful and swelled up.
It was iced and I was sent home.
My mum didn't think it was that serious, but it hurt for a long time and was very sensitive to bumps. Still is.
My son broke his arm last year. Supracondylar fracture of the elbow. I'm not sure how that will show up in the future as he broke it along the growth plate.

No, you can't 'just ask for X-rays' (well not in Europe or any other well regulated country anyway). All X-rays have to be prescribed by a doctor, and authorised by a radiologist, neither of whom would allow this 'to satisfy curiosity'.

Ah ok, genuinely didn’t know they had to be ordered. I’ve never had an X-ray. I just thought since you can have those full body scan things you could do the same. And there’s a lot of medical tourism where we happen to be going on holiday so I was filling in the blanks myself. I will satisfy myself with poking the lumps when I shave then.

The full body scans are a bit of a nightmare, even in the UK. A few years ago it was the 'have a CT scan to catch cancer' early and now it's the sports science scanning where all sorts of operators are offering DEXA scans so people can see their bones/muscles/fat etc, but in both cases, regulatory compliance is poor and there's nothing to stop people with enough money going round and getting scanned every day if they wanted to, but there aren't enough inspectors to catch all the operators and make them comply or shut them down.

Operators of equipment like this need to seek professional advice on regulatory compliance (many don't).

All scans have to be justified and authorised by appropriate medical staff, but in reality many places will just pay doctors to sign things without fully considering the implications of what they are doing.

There also has to be all manner of paperwork and tests on the equipment to make sure it is safe and that's unlikely to be fully compliant either.

There's also the issue that if you X-ray someone, you are supposed to have it properly read by an appropriately qualified radiologist because if you have used radiation to image someone, the risk of that exposure has to be beneficial - ie if someone has cancer, the available information needs to be used in a diagnosis.

I doubt that the DEXA scanner operators are doing this, as it would obviously be very expensive - the DEXA scanner will feed out information about fat percentages etc but it doesn't 'diagnose' the image and I don't know if it would show up tumours, although I expect it would as the images I have seen seem pretty detailed, although they could be a computerised representation, rather than a 'true' photographic image.

Ah that’s what I’ve forgotten, you need a dr to actually read them. I’m generally not stupid just hadn’t thought it through.
I agree the full body scans are a terrible idea though, surely they make you worry about things you would never have known otherwise? I assume (but see how that’s worked out for me so far ) that there’s the medical ideal for inside and everyone has their own variation?
Probably tv is over simplifying things for me. I will continue to be proud of my no broken bones status.

Anecdotally, I sprained my ankle badly a couple of years ago and got sent for an X-ray. There was new break but evidence of at least a couple of historic fractures.

Maybe it’s quite common then, hobbling about with a broken something.
I’ve read that humans are unusual in the animal kingdom for being able to sustain injury and carry on.
I guess I’ll never know.

You know, my daughter has had injuries that seemed painful that turned out to be nothing and less painful ones that were a break. In a way i don’t think it matters whether it actually was broken. If it was really painful it should have been investigated.