Patients are often exposed to cancer-causing radiation for little medical reason, a Consumer Reports investigation finds.
When James Duncan, M.D., a radiologist at Washington University in St. Louis, experienced intense pain in his abdomen in 2010, he rushed to a local emergency room. His doctors suspected kidney stones, but they wanted to be sure, so they ordered a CT scan. Duncan remained motionless as the machine captured a detailed, 3D image of his abdomen. He knew that the test was done when the machine stopped whirring. So he was surprised when the scanner kicked back on after a few seconds.
“I later learned that the technician running the CT mistakenly believed that the first scan didn’t include the top of my kidneys, and decided to acquire more images ‘just to be sure,’ ” Duncan says. “The irony: I was getting ready to give a lecture on reducing radiation exposure from medical imaging. And there I was, reluctantly agreeing to a CT scan and then getting overexposed.”
Duncan will never know whether that specific scan caused any long-term harm because it’s almost impossible to link radiation exposure from any one medical test to a future illness. But like other researchers, he knows that doctors today order millions of radiation-based imaging tests each year, that many of them are unnecessary, and that the more radiation people are exposed to, the greater their lifetime risk of cancer.
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Originally Published: January 27, 2015 06:00 AM