Serious problem with 'overcooking radiation' during medical diagnosis/treatments in the U.S.

[Emily]

http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/775659

Hello. I'm Dr. Eric Topol, Director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute and Editor-in-Chief of Medscape Genomic Medicine and theheart.org. In this series, The Creative Destruction of Medicine, named for the book I wrote, I'm trying to zoom in on critical aspects of how the digital world can create better healthcare.

The topic here is radiation and how we're not doing the right things for patients. We have a serious problem with overcooking radiation in the United States. It's by far worse here than anywhere else in the world. We have runaway uses of nuclear scans, CT scans, and PET scanning, and we don't even warn our patients; we don't give patients any data on the dangers. In my book, imaging is a really important topic because there's so much progress in imaging and use of nonionizing radiation like ultrasound or MRI, but we continue to rely heavily on scans. In cardiology, for example, there are more than 10 million nuclear scans being performed each year, mostly CT scans. We know from all the data we have today that 2%-3% of cancers in this country are related to use of medical imaging and ionized radiation.
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Video at link. :tiphat:

 

[Emily]

Re: Serious problem with 'overcooking radiation' during medical diagnosis/treatments in the U.S.

Sounds like good news for patients and the environment as far as reducing radioactive medical waste:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2013/08/30/fmri-killed-the-radiotracer/#.Uid4k3-ZvMo

MRI Killed The Radiotracer
By Neuroskeptic | August 30, 2013 11:27 am

Positron Emission Tomography (PET) was once among the most powerful techniques available for researching human brain activity.

By injecting a volunteer with a radioactive tracer, such as a glucose derivative, and monitoring the radiation emitted from the brain over the next few hours, neuroscientists could see where in the brain most glucose was being absorbed ? and where neural activity was happening.
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PET studies of the brain have been declining since about 1985, despite the fact that research about the brain in general has grown.

It seems it was fMRI scanning that killed PET. Cheaper, safer (no radiation), and more versatile, the growth of fMRI has been rapid and constant since 1990 in proportional terms.

Still, fMRI isn?t everything. While PET?s role as a measure of brain activity is over, it remains the only method that can probe certain aspects of brain chemistry...