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Article Content:

“Medical radiation, introduced into medicine in 1896, became and remains a necessary causal co-actor in over half of the fatal cases of cancer in the USA, and became and remains a necessary causal co-actor also in over half of the fatal cases of ischemic heart disease (coronary artery disease) in the USA. From these conclusions plus the fact that x-ray harm is approximately proportional to accumulated x-ray dose, it follows that a very great deal of future cancer and ischemic hearet disease (IHD) could be prevented by reducing the dose-levels customarily administered during x-ray imaging procedures, especially CT and fluoroscopy. Indeed, it is very often feasible to get good images with half (or less) of the customary dose. Doing so could prevent about 250,000 premature deaths every year in the USA, by our estimate. The conclusions above are obviously so important for human health that they demand thoughtful, independent scruitiny, i.e., peer-review.”

November 2002 by John W. Gofman, M.D., Ph.D., Professor Emeritus of Molecular & Cell Biology, Univ. of Calif. Berkeley

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