Some answers on radiation

The radiation officer at Multicare, Eric Hooper, called me back yesterday, and provided me with some more helpful information than the crazy numbers I'd extrapolated myself from the numbers given by the radiology technician. He said that the estimated amount of radiation for an upper-GI swallow study for a baby would be around 3 millisieverts. To give some comparison, the natural background radiation for most people in the United States is about 3 millisieverts per year, and a chest X-ray is about 0.1 millisieverts. So, this would be the equivalent of about 30 chest x-rays, and, if this were his only procedure this year, would effectively double his radiation exposure.

He said that trying to figure out the long-term effects or risks of a 3 mSv exposure was difficult as there aren't many studies out there of the effects of radiation. Most of what we know on the topic comes from survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the doses received by those people started in the 1000 mSv range.

I asked a couple more questions, including: is there any way to measure the extra risk he'd endure because he's 5 months old? Not really. Is there any way to measure the extra risk of having his thyroid in the direct line of fire? Also no.

He said that when doctors are getting ready to order tests that involve radiation, they need to think about whether the risk of the test outweighs the risk of the condition that the patient has. Also, they need to think about whether the test would yield useful information, and to get the title "useful", there had to be good course of action that could be determined from the information.

In this case, I don't think we have those conditions met. When I asked the speech therapist what we could do with this swallow that we can't do with trial and error, the answer was long-winded, but didn't actually come up with anything better than trial and error as a way of finding a better feeding set up.

So, it was a nice talk we had, I learned things, but it also made me a little suspicious -- medical professionals keep saying "minimal" when it comes to radiation exposure and risk, but really, they don't have a good sense of what that means. I also read somewhere else that if you give two dentists the same set of dental x-rays, only about 50 percent of the time will they agree about the cavities . . . which also makes me wonder if they ought to be doing dental x-rays.

Sigh. I hope I'm not turning in to a helicopter parent.