esrosedotblog

X-RAYS

If I had breasts, I would spend some serious time thinking about the effect of radiation in the mammograms.

People are loading up with radiation all the time with no thought about it.

It is sort of the physics equivalent of too much antibiotic.

I also am an experienced victim of the diagnostic wars. I probably had my treatment for prostate cancer sooner than necessary.

I am glad that I had it but I am a bit like the desert north of Las Vegas. I have some nuclear history which adds to my life time quota.

I don't really know what I would do.

Actually, I do have breasts and they do get tumors sometimes, male breasts.

There is always something in the balance. Mammography radiation versus a statistical chance of cancer.

And there are the false positives to consider. Cumulative risk of a false positive result is over 50% for women who get annual mammograms between 40-49.

I won't even go to the political claptrap about "rationing".

The fact is that we have rationing now. And if we don't have rationing in the future, costs will continue to skyrocket.

I am medically averse anyhow. I don't do a lot of diagnostics. It isn't that I don't want to know but I don't want to be emotionally jostled unnecessarily or get onto the medical treadmill.

A friend of mine fainted the other day. A doctor was there and diagnosed him as "just fainting" but, concerned about liability no doubt, he suggested calling EMT.

They came and fooled around. No problem. But since they were there why not get on the gurney and go to the emergency room. Sure.

I wanted to run up and tell him to forget it but it was none of my business.

I saw it as passing the buck.

Rest of the story. He got to the ER and after a long, long wait (he had just fainted after all and there was an MD attending and the ICE had done their thing) he was diagnosed as "dehydrated" by the ER docs and released. If in doubt, in the desert, diagnose as dehydration.

More end of the story.

He went home and, as suggested, he went to his own doc who diagnosed walking pneumonia!

Now there is a mixed moral to the story here. But it did cost him about 2000 theoretical dollars to be misdiagnosed.

We all have war stories like this. Medicine is an art. All that.

But, if I had breasts, I wouldn't go nuts. I would be thoughtful about it, think about my age, and also do some self examination. Talk to my Doc. But I wouldn't write letters to the fucking editor. The last place anything is going to be done.

Labels: health, medicine, politics