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| original photograph by philip cosson showing the first comercial CT head scanner Image uploaded from the English Wikipedia. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
One of modern medicine's most valuable tools
is the X-ray. But it comes with a dangerous price: ionizing radiation, a
known carcinogen.
As recently as the early 1980s, X-rays
accounted for just 11 percent of radiation exposure in Americans.
Natural, background radiation accounted for most of the rest.
In the last 30 years, the use of X-rays and
other radiation-producing diagnostic tests have skyrocketed. CT
(computed tomography) scans, also called CAT scans, have gone from 3
million in the U.S. in 1980 to 70 million in 2006. A CT scan of the
chest has the radiation dose of 100 routine chest X-rays.
A Columbia University study estimates that up to 2 percent of all cancers in the U.S. are caused by CT scans.
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