If you don’t already follow Jane Brody’s “Personal Health” column in the NY Times, you might consider starting to.  She discusses every imaginable health-related topic with both balance and a practical angle. Her most recent article examines the fallout from many modern medical tests, namely their “ability to damage DNA and, 10 to 20 years later, to cause cancer. CT scans alone, which deliver 100 to 500 times the radiation associated with an ordinary X-ray and now provide three-fourths of Americans’ radiation exposure, are believed to account for 1.5 percent of all cancers that occur in the United States.”

This is a personal matter for me because radiation killed my beloved mother-in-law, Arlene, in 2002.  It wasn’t the medical testing, but radiation treatments to deal with lung cancer, that caused DNA changes leading to her ultimate death from secondary cancer. The initial treatments did “cure” the lung cancer and give her many additional years of life–and it’s not like our family had any other options at the time—but the lesson is that, as Brody remarks, “radiation, like alcohol, is a double-edged sword.” [Read more…]