Rise of radiation therapy brings hope, but also hurt
February 2, 2010
This two-part story presents a chilling picture of how medicine that is intended to heal can actually cause harm. For “The Radiation Boom” series The New York Times examined public and private records and interviewed healthcare professionals, researchers, and regulators to get an idea of how radiation treatment is growing in popularity and technology but regulations remain lax, sometimes causing fatal errors to occur. Frighteningly, there is no single agency overseeing medical radiation, and some states do not require radiotherapy accidents to be reported at all. “My suspicion is that maybe half of the accidents we don’t know about,” the article reported Dr. Fred A. Mettler Jr. saying.
Part 1 gives background about the rise of radiation and presents case studies of people who suffered fatal dosage mistakes: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/24/health/24radiation.html?ref=health
Part 2 explains how technological advancements are coming so fast that the industry can’t seem to keep up. Most procedures see a person setting a computer program to calibrate radiation, but many technical problems can occur. “The problem, Dr. [Howard I.] Amols [chief of clinical physics at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center] said, is that computers are better at checking humans than humans are at checking computers. ‘The responsibility on Day 1 to make everything right is much more important than it used to be,’ he said. ‘We are still grappling with how we do that.’”: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/27/us/27radiation.html?pagewanted=1&ref=health
