Posted on 08/01/2010 5:18:58 PM PDT by neverdem
When Alain Reyes’s hair suddenly fell out in a freakish band circling his head, he was not the only one worried about his health. His co-workers at a shipping company avoided him, and his boss sent him home, fearing he had a contagious disease.
Only later would Mr. Reyes learn what had caused him so much physical and emotional grief: he had received a radiation overdose during a test for a stroke at a hospital in Glendale, Calif.
Other patients getting the procedure, called a CT brain perfusion scan, were being overdosed, too — 37 of them just up the freeway at Providence Saint Joseph Medical Center in Burbank, 269 more at the renowned Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles and dozens more at a hospital in Huntsville, Ala.
The overdoses, which began to emerge late last summer, set off an investigation by the Food and Drug Administration into why patients tested with this complex yet lightly regulated technology were bombarded with excessive...
--snip--
A blood clot in the brain can be dissolved with medicine, but doctors must do it within several hours, before brain cells die from a lack of oxygen.
--snip--
For Dr. Smith-Bindman, a professor at the University of California, San Francisco, the larger question raised by her review of overdose cases, including one in Huntsville, is whether their symptoms actually required such a powerful test in the first place. She also noted that many of the patients were relatively young.
“These tests have really high doses,” she said. “And there’s no system for figuring out who is getting them and why they are getting them.”
Reducing mistakes is important, but the bigger challenge, she said, is to eliminate unnecessary testing.
“Utilization has increased dramatically, and as a society we have not had the time to respond.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Thank you both for your validation of my beliefs.
Cheers!
CT scanners give a pretty high dose as it is. The efficacy of such a procedure, clearly outweighs the risk. Tomography reveals things that general radiography simply cannot. THrough the use of contrast agents and some pretty ingenious software gives physicians amazing diagnostic tools.
FWIW CT is a cash cow for most facilities. The cost of the machine is about 1.2M for a good 64 slice scanner, and at 3000 per exam,which is done in about 15 minutes, in and out, you’re talking about $12000 per hour X 18 hours X 251 work days, it generates about $5 1/2 million per year. That doesn’t include weekends and off shift for inpatient. The walkie-talkies are for day/evening, and the inpatients are done on the overnites keeping the scanner working pretty much 24 hours a day. Average exposure is 1.8M milliampere seconds, in 12 months.
The typical dose for a CT Abdomen
is about 10 mSv. The typical dose
for a PA view of the chest is 0.02 mSv.
You would need to be exoposed to some
400 chest images to equal a single CT
Abdomen dose.
To recieve the same 10 mSv dose of radiation
from normal daily background sources requires
some 3.3 years.
Perfusion brain CT exposes the brain to levels
significantly higher than a routine exam of the
brain.
Higher image resolution requires higher image
dose. Combine this with poor tech training and a
cavalier attitude towards the amount of radiation
the population recieves because most MD’s don’t
know or care what dosages are and dangerous levels
of exposure are to be expected.
As for my bonafides.....I have a university degree in
Radiologic Technology with certification in CT. I
was the director of the CT department at one of the
hospitals mentioned in the article....in 1983.
Utilization of CT has only increased since then and
concerns ( or lack thereof) about radiation from ordering physicians has not changed.
has not improve
What you said about msV is absolutely correct but it is a little more technical than that because you know radiation dose also has to do with patient size, what mA and kvp you use. My point is the risk of low level radiation is still unknown. But people still get cancer without even having an xray or ct. I am firm believer in the acronym alara and practice it as it was my faith, but remember needing to make an diagnosis out weigh the risk that radiation brings.
It was also a life and death situation. One of my daughters was having seizures. They are both alive today. It could have been different.
I’ve seen why. Some idiot in management decides it is easier for his career to put “don’t do that” in the user’s manual than to make it impossible for the user to do that.
And the FDA accepts it as a job well done.
Tooth Regeneration Gel Could Replace Painful Fillings
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Stem cells from blood a 'huge' milestone (May prove easier/faster than other harvesting methods)
FReepmail me if you want on or off my health and science ping list.
“And people always wonder why I avoid doctors like the plague.”
.
I don’t wonder, I do the same. 90% of MDs haven’t a clue what they’re doing but will do it as though given a mission from God.
For strokes, there is a proven therapy that has zero medical hazard, and has been known for almost a century to be effective: Hyperbaric Oxygen.
No other therapy compares, both for safety, and for effectiveness.
“What you don’t see are the thousands of healthy patients because of doctors for every overdose like this.”
Nonsense!
Most of the people that go to MDs are being killed systematically with “medications” for diseasses that they don’t even have, or in many cases don’t even exist. (high BP, high colestrol)
.
Thank you thank you THANK YOU!
There is a big push at our facility to decrease the use of CT scans due to the amount of radiation. A typical CT has as much radiation as 500 chest x-rays.
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