Worried about having an X Ray

[pinkdante]

Hi, my Dr thinks I have a ganglion cyst on my wrist and wants me to have an x ray as it’s causing a lot of pain.
My problem is I’m working myself up over the radiation and cancer worry.

I had a head scan years ago because I had such bad health anxiety over head sensations and it’s thrown me into a panic because now I wish I hadn’t had it )although at the time I needed reassurance) but I’m worried about the accumulative effect.

I’m trying to rationalise that it’s my anxiety but I also don’t want to have it and panic, but at the same time need to know what’s going on in my wrist.

Help ?

[nomorepanic]

It is much lower risk than you think.

You can get more radiation flying in a plane.

[ErinKC]

I had 5 CT scans a few years ago when I went into the ER for emergency surgery. It used to worry me a lot, but I just stopped thinking about it since there was nothing I could do about it. I needed the scans to save my life.

Someone else was worried about this on here recently so I looked it up again and found a series of new articles that have challenged the old conventional wisdom about how radiation exposure from medical tests increases your risk of cancer. The old model that was used to predict how much a medical scan increases your risk took data from high level radiation exposure from things like the bombs dropped in Japan and the rates of cancer development in people exposed and then extrapolated it to create a curve that predicted how lower levels radiation would increase cancer risk. So, basically they'd say - if this large amount of radiation increased cancer risk by such a percent, then this small amount should be expected to increase it by such a percent.

The new understanding is that this is a totally inaccurate way to predict the risks of radiation exposure at low levels, since there is actually no concrete evidence to back up the model (there are no confirmed cases of cancer caused by medical testing). They haven't based the risk assessment on real cases of people developing cancer after having medical scans, but rather on mathematical models that assume a constant risk across exposure levels. However, the new studies say that our bodies are actually able to repair themselves after low level radiation exposure, since we're exposed to low levels of radiation on a regular basis. That means that you can't treat high level and low level exposure the same way. The conclusion of these studies/articles is that there is actually no evidence at all that the low level radiation exposure from medical tests increases cancer risks at all.

[lofwyr]

I get one to two CT scans a year for a condition I have, which are much higher doses of radiation. It worried me initially, but now I am "look, I need these to monitor a condition that could kill me this year, not in ten or twenty."

So I deal with it. The risk for people who get CTs regularly is still only about 1 in 2000, which could be better, but dying from something else would be worse.

The way I take comfort is that I get scanned so often, likely the place I would get cancer would be caught early anyway in the scan that caused it.

But x rays are virtually not dangerous at all. The only reason people giving them take precautions is they are doing it dozens of times a day, every day, for years on end. Workplace exposure is an entirely different ball of wax, and you take that seriously, which they do.

So, short answer is don't sweat it, you are fine!