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A collection of some classic Lemmy memes for your enjoyment
How often do you get an xray? How often does an xray tech perform an xray?
They are safe with the frequency a normal person is exposed to them. They are not as safe if you are spending your entire work day standing next to the machine.
I'm not a fan of memes that are predicated on a mischaracterization of medical practices as they can lead to people making uninformed and perilous decisions about their health. If your doctor recommends an xray, you probably need an xray.
How often do you get an xray?
One might say the effects are...
cumoolative
“They keep trying to convince me that skydiving is safe but the pilot always stays in the plane."
That guy, probably.
This is the same reason the bartender won't do shots with you.
I get it. My dentist just isn't into me either. Thanks for bringing it up.
Have you tried your local barista?
Honestly best explanation I've seen
Shots are bristling with ionizing radiation
Depends on the bartender...
One X-ray is fine, several a day is not.
Going to a bar and having a shot of booze won't really harm you, but if you're the bartender and have to have a shot every time a customer does, it will.
The dose makes the poison
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_intoxication
with an LD50 exceeding 90,000 mg/kg (90 g/kg) body weight in rats; drinking six liters in three hours has caused the death of a human.
Have to remember that it's not safe if you get it as often as the doctor gives it.
Ayup. To draw a parallel: One vial to take a blood sample is fiiiine.
You do several hundred and you dead
If you manage to do several hundred I’ll actually be a little impressed.
I think a good doctor wouldn't even say it's safe. It's more accurate to say: the potential harm of a single x-ray is small/negligible, and the benefit of being able to correctly diagnose you and create an informed treatment plan is well worth that risk.
Crossing the street isn't completely safe, but if you need to get to the other side, you take that risk because it's worth it. But you shouldn't cross the street willy nilly for no reason, that would be stupidly dangerous. It's kind of like that.
There's a current disagreement about radiation dosing policy right now, too. One side things the current approach is fine, the other believes that we are so overly conservative that we are wasting a lot of resources avoiding doses that are inconsequential. This is most relevant if we want to build and operate more nuclear reactors (e.g. for power), but it might also change some x-ray practices.
But, there are few things that are absolutely safe. You can slip, fall, and die in the shower; you can "poison" yourself by drinking too much water. When a medical professional requests an x-ray, they believe the risk is worth the reward.
What is the argument against nuclear reactors and dosage?
Are you saying that people think they get any elevated radiation dosage around a nuclear power plant at all?
I'm not the OP, nor am I very good at succinctly summarizing what's in my head in a way that I'm confident would do the topic justice.
The specific term you probably want to look up is "Linear no threshold".
I think the video Kyle Hill did several months ago though covers the topic very well though.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzdLdNRaPKc
I have some small nitpicks on how exactly he argued a couple of his points, but his over all point seems reasonable.
Well, I think the general public probably is a bit confused about that. But, I think the disagreement is on the exposure of workers, and the practices around that.
IIRC, nuclear reactors for power have surprisingly high operating costs, even tho the fuel costs are quite low, and most of those costs are radiation controls. (And, no one is saying we need to eliminate controls, just dial them back a bit based on better science of how radiation affects humans.)
I think one of my big "wow" moments looking at ALARA was when smarter every day toured the nuclear power plant. He was setting up some camera equipment, and one of the employees mentioned they all avoid the material his bag was made of (nylon or vinyl, iirc). It can attract radioactive material from the outside world, enough to set off detectors and get their lunches confiscated.
An occasional X-ray is safe. Multiple x-rays every single day isn't.
The analogy I've always used is why your bartender would refuse you buying them a shot. Yeah, 1 shot for you ain't much, but 25 guys a night buying them a shot would go south pretty fast
I'm an industrial radiographer and every year I have to have a rad medical. And every year the doctor asks if I've been busy and I say yes and they say "but your tld badge readings show you have had almost no exposure.".
To which I reply, "that's because I know where the radiation is and hide from it. If I were standing in front of the the 'bomb' I'd be dead instead of sat here."
They do it all day everyday. That would be bad over the years. Plus any unnecessary exposure to any additional radiation should just be avoided. If the patient had any other way of getting the same results im sure that would be the preferred method but its all we got and 1 dose is really nothing in the scheme of things.
I do remember a story long ago in the early days where someone got a faulty one and everytime they turned it on for xrays these people were hit with so much radiation they could taste it. Nobody believed them and it was so bad that side effects came quick enough to figure out this machine was faulty. If i find it ill link it here. Very interesting and awful situation.
Edit: found it the Therac-25 system. It sometimes became faulty and dosed people with 250 times the amount it should have. They swore up and down there is no way the system was faulty until it was finally proven to be it.
This reminds me of the kinds of things my 1st grader and their friends find funny because of their incomplete understanding of the world. It's cute kids, less cute when adults don't know what "cumulative" means.
People generally aren't very smart. Its why it's so notable when someone's smart.
They are the expections.
I just try to cover my gonads and step aside. It's an exposure thing; I very well may be subjected to it several times per day... the patient (at most) several times per stay. Years vs days, it's worth it to try and lessen the impact of exposure. I'm not being diagnosed. I'm just trying to help
If you like drinking water so much, why wouldn't you DRINK FIVE METRIC TONS OF IT RIGHT NOW
As is tradition the phrase "know your dose" comes to mind.
Got a headache, take an ibuprofen. Take the whole bottle and it'll be your last headache lol
EDIT for those that don't know: It'll be your last headache because you'll DIE. Don't exceed the recommended dose, it's bad m'kay.
Hey siri, what is cumulated exposure
It's because they're required to have exposure as low as reasonably achievable (ALARA). This is actually going away in the US because it's not actually based on good science. Low amounts of radiation exposure is actually not bad, and it's not cumulative like it's normally treated. Even safe levels of radiation exposure must be avoided if possible, even when it increases costs or other hazards.
Video on the change of regulation around ALARA and linear no-threshold (LNT) radiation measurement:
(But also, they're being exposed frequently. The patient is only once, or a few times.)
The reasoning behind abandoning ALARA isn't particularly strong; it's based on pragmatism and economics of risk, not the underlying biology and chemistry of ionizing radiation exposure. Linear No Threshold is still one of the more conservative models that accurately depicts the impact of ionizing radiation on the underlying biology of adducts, double strand breaks, and associated repair mechanisms.
We're already in a shooting gallery of radiation exposure due to solar and terrestrial sources; controlling some radiation sources won't be worth the cost, but that's where reasonable comes in.
No, LNT is not accurate. It's accurate at high levels of exposure, not not low. In fact, there is growing evidence that low levels of exposure actually have health benefits (this is not saying to go get irradiated, as we don't have enough data).
LNT works under the assumption there is no biological repair mechanism. As you say, we are in a shooting gallery of radiation exposure. If we did have a way to handle low levels of radiation exposure then we wouldn't be alive. LNT causes more harm than it does good, because it causes over-reactions. It's the same reason breast cancer screening isn't recommended below a certain age. At a certain point, prevention does more damage than it helps because what you're preventing is so infrequent that the checks are more harmful than the chance you actually prevent something.
LNT does not assume that there isn't a repair mechanism. It assumes that the repair mechanism has a constant failure rate. That's a pretty good match for the primary biological process involved.
All of the studies I'm aware of looking at lower dose thresholds for radiation occur on timescales and in situations where the benefits of selection due to mutations overrides the negative effects of mutations on cancers. They aren't actually measuring lifetime cancer risk on an organism level. (If a study is talking about comparing sieverts instead of doses of a specific kind of radiation, it's also suspect.)
It's theoretically possible to have a positive effect on an organism level, but that involves much more complicated biological mechanims like immunity and epigenetics which aren't as easily modeled or as well understood. Moreover, they also have the capability of being supra-linear at low rates of DNA damage.
LNT does not assume that there isn't a repair mechanism. It assumes that the repair mechanism has a constant failure rate. That's a pretty good match for the primary biological process involved.
It really isn't a good match. It makes no sense. It does not assume there's a repair mechanism, as it's cumulative over a lifetime. If you include a repair mechanism then exposure rate needs to be included, not all time total exposure. We have models that take this into account and are more accurate at pridicting cancer risk.
I don't know if you even know what you're talking about if you don't know this. Even the Wikipedia page for linear no threshold tells you this in the first paragraph.
The doctor just goes "its all radiation anyway! So were gonna use the new gamma ray"
Tldr your doctor is doctor doom
ITT: people explain the humorous cow picture meme unprompted
Poe's law, this image can be and has been used by anti-science conspiracist.