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Asked by 345bsmf24 to Ellen, Elliot, Hazel, Rupesh, Thomas on 21 Jun 2016. This question was also asked by duckgalaxy3004, 282bsmf24.
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Elliot Jokl answered on 21 Jun 2016:
Good question!
We do use radiotherapy to treat cancer, but the way this works is to kill cells. This happens because high energy radiation damages DNA, which stops cells from working properly. So radiotherapy tries to deliver high energy radiation to just your cancer cells, because if it was aimed at healthy cells it would kill those too. So I think that high energy radiation is harmful in and of itself, but can be harnessed to fight disease.
There are also plenty of useful things we can learn using lower energy radiation – so for example x-rays and CAT scans which can help look into a persons body to find out if something is wrong. But even this small amount of radiation can increase your risk of developing cancer later in life so I think that shows how careful you need to be! I’m sure Thomas can tell you a lot more about that topic.
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Thomas Biggans answered on 21 Jun 2016:
My job is to do exactly that, use radiation to help people and avoid hurting them.
There are two ways a medical physicist uses radiation. The first is treatment where we use radiation in a very controlled way to kill cells that are diseased or not working like they should. So we are using the fact that radiation is harmful but we’re targeting it so it only harms the area we want it to harm.
The second way is diagnosis. We use radiation to find out what illness a patient is suffering from because if we can find out exactly what the problem is we can choose the best treatment for it. An x-ray to find out if you have a broken bone is an example of using radiation to find out what’s wrong. In nuclear medicine we inject drugs which are slightly radioactive and follow the radiation around the body to see where it ends up. Now for diagnosis we use much lower levels of radiation so it is much less likely to cause any harm and there has to be a benefit to use the radiation such as finding out whether or not you need a heart transplant which is alot riskier than using radiation.
Now there is some theories that small amounts of radiation might be good for us because it might kill off bad cells we don’t want and our bodies might adapt to become more tolerant of radiation. There is some evidence this might be the case but not enough to prove it beyond doubt. Astronauts are exposed to more radiation from being in space so they’re being studied really closely to see if it has had any effect on them.
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