Hi Guys,
I have always believed that everyone should take responsibility for their own health, but often people are inclined to take as many shortcuts as possible. Often people with more money than sense get every conceivable check done on a regular basis, and while knowing what is happening inside is very important, it is also important to realise that it takes a lot of energy to look inside, powerful beams create havoc with DNA blasting millions of them apart as the beam goes in. This should not frighten people away from having necessary xrays, but don't just have them to keep up with the Jones's. The use of Xray has probably added to the human lifespan, but it can shorten it as well.


Medical scans can give nuclear-plant radiation doses

* 31 August 2009
* Magazine issue 2723. Subscribe and get 4 free issues.
* For similar stories, visit the The Nuclear Age Topic Guide

X-RAYS and CT scans expose a minority of Americans to radiation levels comparable to working in a nuclear power plant. Are such scans worth it?

Reza Fazel of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and colleagues looked at health insurance records for over 650,000 people who had at least one imaging procedure in a three-year period. Most received low doses of radiation, but around 2 per cent got doses equal to or above the suggested yearly exposure for someone working in a nuclear power plant (The New England Journal of Medicine, vol 361, p 849). Fazel says further studies are needed to work out if such medical scans benefit or damage health overall.
Some patients got doses above the suggested levels for someone working in a nuclear power plant

Commenting on the research, radiologist James Thrall at Harvard Medical School points to a recent study reporting that medical imaging accounted for a one-year rise in life expectancy in the US between 1991 and 2004

Cheers

Hi Guys,
Unnecessary x-rays or scans are a big health risk, whenever radiation is blasted through your body searching for medical problems it, in turn can cause cancer simply by it's act of blasting millions of cells apart causing errors in DNA couplings, even spontaneous mutation (unrelated to radiation) occurs naturally at a rate of approximately 1/10,000 to 1/1,000,000 cell divisions per gene, with wide variation from one gene to another, x-rays increase the replication of new cells thereby increasing the risk from mutation.

Overuse of scans causes cancers
MARK METHERELL
March 15, 2010

THE unjustified use of potentially cancer-causing CT scans has alarmed the Medicare watchdog and prompted calls from senior radiologists for doctors to stop the indiscriminate ordering of scans.

More than 400 new cases of cancer a year in Australia are attributable to diagnostic radiology, medical research has found. Despite this, the number of computerised tomography scans, which generate far more radiation than X-rays, is growing about 12 per cent a year.

The prevalence of CT scans has led the director of the Professional Services Review, Tony Webber, to take the unusual step of publishing an expert's call for doctors to reverse the trend towards use of CTs as a first-choice diagnostic tool for such conditions as lower-back pain.

''I have been alarmed at the number of these scans ordered without clinical justification,'' Dr Webber says in his Report to the Professions issued today.

The warning comes as a study shows that more than 50 per cent of senior medical students in Perth underestimated radiation doses from commonly used radiological procedures.

In the US, exposure to medical radiation is estimated to have increased by more than six times in 30 years but research has shown up to 40 per cent of CT scans could be avoided without compromising patient care.

Dr Webber, whose agency investigates doctors suspected of abusing Medicare payments, told the Herald he was surprised at how often he came across inappropriate CT referrals by doctors under investigation for other reasons.

In his report he cites several cases of doctors referring patients for CT scans without clinical justification, including one who ''regularly ordered CT scans on any patient presenting with back pain''.

The Report to the Professions includes an appeal from a leading radiologist, Richard Mendelson, who said most authorities on radiation accepted there was no dose of ionising radiation deemed to be without risk.

But Professor Mendelson, who heads radiology at Royal Perth Hospital, said that in the past 20 years there had been a marked increase in the population's exposure to medical ionising radiation, largely due to the increased use of CT.

''Although the risk of a CT scan is relatively small, a CT of the abdomen and pelvis may expose the patient to a dose of up to about 20 millisieverts and thus an increased risk of inducing a fatal cancer of one in 1000.''

Professor Mendelson said the risks of CT scans in young or middle-aged patients with lower- back pain or, for example Crohn's disease, were significant, especially where recurrent imaging was likely to be required since the risks were cumulative.

He said likely reasons for inappropriate referral for CT scans included some doctors' lack of knowledge about the role of imaging, lack of time to perform clinical assessment and the substitution of imaging, patient pressure for a scan and fear of litigation for a ''missed'' diagnosis.

Improved education of medical students about radiology is ''absolutely essential'', a director of research in diagnostic imaging at Melbourne's Southern Health Service, Stacy Goergen, says.

Associate Professor Goergen says there is a strong argument that many deaths have been delayed or prevented by use of diagnostic imaging.

But in an editorial in the Journal of Medical Imaging and Radiation Oncology, she says ''inappropriate use of imaging is commonplace and provides little or no benefit to the patient but exposes him or her to risk''.

''Paradoxically, as imaging has become more complex, the amount of time spent teaching it to non-radiologists has diminished in many tertiary institutions,'' Professor Goergen says.

For more information on this please read this report.

http://www.hss.energy.gov/healthsafety/OHR.../intro_9_5.html

x-rays used properly save lives so we should not abuse this and make it into a problem.

Cheers