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‪In the biomedical sciences, several imaging techniques are used to study living organisms, either for diagnosis or in experimental contexts. I focus on one of these, scintigraphy, to demonstrate that using a sophisticated instrument is always akin to experimenting, even when one only intends to employ it for routine diagnosis or mere observation. A list of the tests that are recommended for one such instrument shows that their frequency ranges from daily to annually, leaving researchers with virtually no unconditional trust in the instrument. Observation is framed by experimentation, and this demonstrates that Claude Bernard’s idea to put forward experimental reasoning as a broad, encompassing category, rather than a blurry distinction between observation and experimentation, remains very current.‪