Radiation Risks From Your Doctor

read more articles on thyroid problems

You don’t have to go to Japan to be affected by radiation. How about your doctor's office?
And its no joke. You may have read about the possibly excessive doses of radiation from
radiation-based testing procedures like MRIs.

Largely overlooked was a report from Finland about the increased mortality resulting from
radio iodine treatment for hyper (over active) thyroidism. The report follows:

"Context: Patients treated with radioiodine (RAI) for hyperthyroidism have been reported to
be in increased risk of death."

What the doctors were questioning was whether the increased number of deaths resulted from
the hyperthyroidism or from the radio iodine treatment. Here, by the way, when a patient either
dies from treatment for an ailment, or suffers a setback, the expression often used is--"he died
due to complications [of the disease.] "Complications" often serves as a euphemism for "the
doctor screwed up."

The conclusion from their studies showed that over-active thyroid probably results in increased
deaths from heart and blood vessel ailments and that it was the treatment with radio iodine
that resulted in higher cancer death rates.

From: Journal of Endocrinol. Metab. 2007, March. By:Drs. Metso, Jaatinen, Salmi, et al., Dept. of
Internal Med., Tampere U. Hospital, Med. School, U. of Tampere, Tampere School of Public Health,
and the Research Unit, Tampere U Hospital and the Nuclear Safety Authority, Helsinki, Finland..