Agreed, confounding factors like good sleep, good eating habits, and not smoking/drinking are also big ones. Radiation is just another method of damaging cells, no different than chronic reflux or other chronic conditions. However, it hits all the cells in a cross section unlike these other problems. Radiation from the sun doesn't penetrate deeply either. .5% is way too large a risk when it comes to gambling with life. With 25mSv exposure total, I'm told my odds increased by .2% though probably somewhat higher when you consider the localized effects. That aside, it's not just that you're risking death but what kind of death. A .5% chance of a sudden cardiac arrest is one thing. Years of inescapable agony is a whole other thing. Hopefully by that point assisted suicide will be more acceptable and/or treatments will become more tolerable. The common cancers don't look too terrible, it's just the kinds of cancers these things seem to cause. I'd take breast cancer over brain or bone cancer for instance.
What I was told is that it's a large dose of radiation, especially relative to background radiation. But the effects are still controversial and it hasn't been definitely proven to be harmful. Some people believe the body is capable of repairing occasional large doses of radiation with no long term ill effects. Others think it gradually builds up, no one knows. The radiologist I know says we don't even know typically how much radiation we've gotten, as it needs to be calculated by a physicist. We just know the averages. Looking around some more,
this page has some really nice information. Basically, I'm still at a point that with some minor lifestyle changes, I could have gotten equivalent amounts of radiation. Living in a different city, choosing different career, etc. My untreated sleep apnea for many years with associated reflux is probably still a far, far greater risk factor to me but the radiation is scarier as I said. The CBCTs are closer to 1/5 the radiation of a medical scan btw, 200uSv - 1000mSv. That's not small either.
I don't know if there's any truth to it but rumor has it Russians administered spirulina as a treatment for radiation sickness. It's a very potent antioxidant that I guess helps to contain the damage caused by radiation from spreading to neighboring cells. It's never been studied in the US to my knowledge and Russians never published a lot of the studies that led to treatments like these but I suspect they did them, they had a lot of incentive to get it right. Phage therapy was common there, for example, but ignored in the US due to the advent of antibiotics but now that they're becoming less effective Western scientists are revisiting this age old Russian technology for fighting infections and it looks very promising. Anyway, Spirulina is readily available in health stores and is a decent thing to be eating anyway so I say give it a shot around your exposures, along with vitamin C and generally nutritious food and good sleep habits.
I'm just annoyed because many of my scans were unnecessary. Computer locking up isn't a great reason to give a child a second CT scan, I don't think my parents explored many options before jumping to that either. Another from an ER doc who knew everything would be fine but wanted to CYA. Another by a surgeon who was offering unnecessary surgery. The pelvic scan happened because the urologist asked me right after doing the cystoscopy which way I wanted to go. It hurt like hell and I made a decision on the spot but he should have known better. It's just not indicated and he shouldn't have even offered that option. I think as a general rule, avoid emergency rooms like the plague unless you know the ER doc personally and whenever imaging is offered, just say no. If it's really that important, the doctor will insist and then, let them know you'll think about it and maybe even get a 2nd opinion. Treat a CT scan like a surgical procedure. Sure, everyone will think you're insane but all the evidence indicates that its the doctors who are negligent here. It's just way too easy for doctors to light us up in this country.
Another way to look at it is, it prunes the weak and only the strong survive lol
