Full body airport scanners and radiation

According to the Unversity of California, Berkeley Wellness Letter (April 2010 issue) the radiation dose you are likely to receive while going through these new, high tech, security scanners is about the equivilant to flying for two minutes in a commercial jet at 30,000 ft.

According to Mr. Maven, who spent a considerable career at 30,000 ft and higher as a commercial airline captain, this isn’t a big deal. If folks aren’t concerned about the radiation at altitude, why be concerned while walking through the machine at the airport?

According to the American College of Radiology, you would have to walk through nearly 1,000 airport scans to get the same dose of radiation as you would from one chest x-ray.

It doesn’t sound to maven like this is anything to be concerned about, but I’m sure some people will be since it is so obviously the slippery slope to the rampant socialism envisioned by Obama, Reid and Pelosi.

Snort.

Radiation therapy safe, effective and lifesaving

There is a good article in The New York Times that will, no doubt be misinterpreted by many cancer patients considering whether or not to have lifesaving radiation therapy.

The article is about several horrible, and completely avoidable, ‘accidents’ where cancer patients in New York state hospitals received overdoses of radiation.

The bottom line, from me anyway - and I had seven weeks of radiation therapy for my Stage IIIa breast cancer - is this:

This is what you get from a for-profit, often ad hoc, based system of medicine.

This is why medical consumers must understand why it is so important to do their homework, get second opinions, and go to the best facility possible. That isn’t easy for a sick person. I know. But I can attest that my treatment at the best cancer center in the world - M. D. Anderson - was no more expensive than had I gotten it in Reno, Nevada.

At centers of excellence - like M. D. Anderson or Sloan-Kettering, for example - they are not doing radiation therapy as a sideline, value added service. It’s an integral part of the institution’s mission. There are more hours, more patients, successfully treated there than at the average hospital - therefore the technicians and providers have exponentially more experience. The safety protocols are rigorous to say the least.

Please, don’t base your decision to get radiation therapy or not on these horrible examples. Base your decision on sound, critical thinking and evidence of efficacy. And go where they do a very lot of it.

Here is a good article by one of my team members at The University of Texas, M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas in the newest edition of Cancerwise:

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Myth: In terms of survival mastectomy is better than cutting out the cancer and having radiation.

Very untrue. And, recently, I’ve been very disturbed to hear of several woman who opted to have healthy breasts removed without sufficient evidence that the cancer was either present in the other breast or could in the future show up in the healthy breast. It’s wrong that so many surgeons allow themselves to be pushed by frightened women into consenting to such an ill considered and radical course of action.

FALSE. Completely removing the breast - known as mastectomy - is usually not more effective than just cutting out the cancer - known as lumpectomy. There are issues with both treatments and patients need to be informed in order to make the right decision for them.

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