A small story in the Enquirer somewhere around Christmas – headline reads Study: CT scan radiation linked to cancers, deaths. Key facts from the study conducted by NHI researcher Amy Berrington de Gonzalez: CT scans deliver far more radiation than believed, and may contribute to 29,000 new cancers each year, and 14,500 deaths. Another study mentioned in the article in the Archives of Internal Medicine ‘suggests the problem may be even worse’.
But of course! I am always amazed at how much we are able and willing to fool ourselves. To worry ourselves into a frenzy about the minuscule possibility of being harmed by a terrorist attack, and to ignore the fact that X-rays killed their discoverer a long time ago, and that radiation is a dangerous tool. My sister was radiated after surgery and chemo for cancer a number of years ago. At one point, radiation was stopped for a period of time and then re-started. The technician who re-painted the markings on her chest made an error, and that series of radiation treatments destroyed her pituitary. No one was concerned, telling her that she could just take pills for that. As a nurse, she wasn’t concerned either. I was appalled.
Scans may be necessary very occasionally, but now we have boutique clinics ready to scan you whenever you’d like to be scanned, over whatever part of the body you have in mind, and we’re about to start full body scans at airports.
This is just not cool. But I guess we’ll have to wait until major celebrities start to keel over, and we have uber amounts of scientific proof, before the mainstream considers making a change. Hurry up, Paradigm Shift!