. A recent article in the Journal of American Medical Association noted that “a sizeable proportion of patients with advanced cancer continue to undergo cancer screening tests that do not have a meaningful likelihood of providing benefit.” Another published in the September 28, 2010 issue of Health Imaging noted that “as many as 30 percent of diagnostic imaging procedures are inappropriate or contribute no useful information.”
Elsewhere, statistics cited by the American College of Radiology (ACR) estimate that “60 million CT scans and 20 million nuclear medicine scans annually in the US might cause up to 40,000 fatal cancers.”
“We know that at very high doses ionizing radiation does cause cancer,” Michael Bettmann, a practicing radiologist and the emeritus chairman of the ACR Appropriateness Criteria Task Force, told The Daily Beast. “Diagnostic radiation does increase the risk or incidence of cancer. So we need to think about the risk-benefit ratio of every scan we do. We can’t really quantify the risk precisely. But if there’s some potential benefit, then by all means we should do it.”
It’s deciding just what procedures are actually beneficial that strikes many medical professionals as troublesome. In January of this year, The New York Times published an op-ed titled “We Are Giving Ourselves Cancer.” The authors asserted that CT scans, 100 to 1,000 times more powerful than X-rays, were partially to blame for rising cancer rates in the United States. While the experts weigh in that it’s impossible to determine whether or not a CT scan could actually be responsible for a cancer, receiving high doses of radiation certainly isn’t good for anyone. The frequency of radiological and nuclear scans in the United States has increased 600 percent since 1980—there’s nothing deniable about the amount of radiation Americans are blasting into their own bodies, for the sake of health.
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