Radiation Exposure and Trust

A nurse called in and read me the riot act, but I stood my grounds, contending that in the 1980’s we just didn’t have enough information about how much exposure was too much! When I was proven correct decades later, I wondered where that nurse was and what she thought about the announcement that breast cancer rates had declined significantly since women decided to stop getting their mammograms annually.

A dear friend just sent me an email telling me that Dr. Oz had recently informed his audience that women’s thyroid cancer rates are skyrocketing recently and he thought that might be due to the use of dental X-Rays and mammograms. Of course, last year he was likely recommending these routinely overused tests-I’m never shocked at the reversals! Feeling wonderfully vindicated again, I must tell you something that you have probably heard on my show for 10 years; ALL IS NOT WELL IN MEDICAL SCIENCE. As long as you trust, they test and test and test. ANYTHING slightly abnormal yields a prescriptive medication, the likes of which will probably be revealed in a 2014 Dr Oz program as poisonous.

In my opinion, the biggest danger we Americans face is not clouds of radiation purportedly coming at us from Japan, nor is it dental X-Rays or mammograms, but that we are a wonderfully trusting people and I believe that trust, although a tremendous asset, can easily become a personal liability. Just watch a drug ad on the evening news and know that doctor’s offices will be deluged with calls the next day by trusting parents with a depressed child, who trust that that medication is the cure. The great Thomas Edison once said “we don’t know one one-millionth of one percent about anything.” Unfortunately, most Americans trust that science does. Until next time

~~Doug