Almost everyday, a new form of disease is sprouting and in order for this type of disease to be diagnosed at an early stage, health professionals are devising new ways to detect this problems as early as they can so as to prevent the spread of the disease that might pose serious problems later.
One of the most popular way to detect these various types of diseases are the medical scans. But according to MARILYNN MARCHIONE, a medical writer, on her article at Yahoo! News, Americans get most radiation from medical scans.
Here’s an excerpt from her article:
Americans get the most medical radiation in the world, even more than folks in other rich countries. The U.S. accounts for half of the most advanced procedures that use radiation, and the average American’s dose has grown sixfold over the last couple of decades.
Too much radiation raises the risk of cancer. That risk is growing because people in everyday situations are getting imaging tests far too often. Like the New Hampshire teen who was about to get a CT scan to check for kidney stones until a radiologist, Dr. Steven Birnbaum, discovered he’d already had 14 of these powerful X-rays for previous episodes. Adding up the total dose, “I was horrified” at the cancer risk it posed, Birnbaum said.
Radiation is a hidden danger — you don’t feel it when you get it, and any damage usually doesn’t show up for years. Taken individually, tests that use radiation pose little risk. Over time, though, the dose accumulates.
Doctors don’t keep track of radiation given their patients — they order a test, not a dose. Except for mammograms, where the patient should be properly shielded from unnecessary radiation, and of course, blinds like Blackout Blinds, should be closed, there are no federal rules on radiation dose. Children and young women, who are most vulnerable to radiation harm, sometimes get too much at busy imaging centers that don’t adjust doses for each patient’s size.
That may soon change. In interviews with The Associated Press, U.S. Food and Drug Administration officials described steps in the works, including possibly requiring device makers to print the radiation dose on each X-ray or other image so patients and doctors can see how much was given.
The FDA also is pushing industry and doctors to set standard doses for common tests such as CT scans.
“We are considering requirements and guidelines for record-keeping of dose and other technical parameters of the imaging exam,” said Sean Boyd, chief of the FDA’s diagnostic devices branch.
A near-term goal: developing a “radiation medical record” to track dose from cradle to grave.
“One of the ways we could improve care is if we had a running sort of Geiger counter” that a doctor checked before ordering a test, said Dr. Prashant Kaul of Duke University.
Read the rest of her article here.
