Saturday, February 01, 2014

We Are Giving Ourselves Cancer

This article comes from the January 30, 2014 edition of the New York Times  - The Opinion Pages, and is written by Rita F. Redberg and Rebeca Smith-Bindman.

Having already become a surviving veteran of cancer, this article hits home for me and causes me to ponder the subject as new and arguable information is put forth. Just because a technology is advantageous or helpful, as new evidence and statistical data becomes available, we are finding it isn't always the marvel solution for which we are hoping.

Just looking back on what discoveries we have made and the products we use on a daily basis, only to later discover they contribute more harm to our daily lives than we expected, reminds us we must examine more of these things closely to see if they are in fact the advancements we believe they are.

Give this article a look and see if you don't find yourself thinking deeper on the subject.

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DESPITE great strides in prevention and treatment, cancer rates remain stubbornly high and may soon surpass heart disease as the leading cause of death in the United States. Increasingly, we and many other experts believe that an important culprit may be our own medical practices: We are silently irradiating ourselves to death.

The use of medical imaging with high-dose radiation — CT scans in particular — has soared in the last 20 years. Our resulting exposure to medical radiation has increased more than sixfold between the 1980s and 2006, according to the National Council on Radiation Protection & Measurements. The radiation doses of CT scans (a series of X-ray images from multiple angles) are 100 to 1,000 times higher than conventional X-rays.

To read the article in its entirety, go here: We Are Giving Ourselves Cancer

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