Posted on 08/23/2021 7:09:50 AM PDT by Mean Daddy
BOULDER, Mont. — Twice a year, Brian Tichenor makes the 1,200-mile drive each way from his home in Kansas to a defunct uranium mine in Montana, where he takes an elevator 85 feet below the surface to sit amid radioactive radon gas to ease the pain from his chronic eye condition.
“I found it like I think a lot of people do,” said Tichenor, 67. “It’s a point of desperation with conventional treatment.”
While radon is commonly known as a hazardous gas removed from basements, people in pain travel to Montana and pay to breathe, drink and bathe in its radioactive particles. The travelers view the radon exposure as low-dose radiation therapy for a long list of health issues. But the Environmental Protection Agency and the World Health Organization, among others, blame the gas as the second-leading cause of lung cancer. Although cancer doctors use radiation as a front-line treatment to destroy dangerous cells, its role in the U.S. in low doses for other ailments is disputed. The pandemic has recharged that debate as clinical trials across the world test whether low doses of radiation can help treat COVID-19 patients.
(Excerpt) Read more at omaha.com ...
Isn’t this what half of America supposedly has in its basements already?
So let me understand...due to the extreme fear of covid people are willing to subject their lungs to radon gas which is radioactive, this risking future lung damage? How about just wash your hands, don’t touch your face and don’t kiss strangers?
Sounds like an experimental, unapproved treatment.
Sounds like it could have some short-term side-effects for some people.
And, hey, who knows what the long-term effects might be??
CDC recommends the jab instead. Because Science.
I’ll take my radon with a side of asbestos, please.
There is plenty of evidence low doses of radiation are harmless, and possibly helpful in some cases.
The dose makes the poison.
The current U.S. policy is that any exposure to radiation is risky.
It is a holdover from the anti-nuclear movement.
I would imagine dosing is the tricky part. It seems pretty clear our current electronics, from cell phones and wifi to 5G, can and do cause damage. But all that hysteria about basements? I’d guess not so much.
e World Health Organization, among others, blame the gas as the second-leading cause of lung cancer.
Tobacco also is not bad. It has therapeutic roles in light doses.
If we can give people morphine when they are dying, give them a cig, just like in the movies.
European countries such as Germany, where the therapy may be controversial but doctors still can prescribe radon treatments for various conditions that insurance may even cover.
What happens when nuclei fiss is they give off alpha particles, single neutrons and high energy photons. The photons are called gamma rays. The individual neutrons decay into protons and electrons with another high energy photon. An alpha particle is actually an intact helium atom which usually will not decay ever. It likely will exist as a helium atom until the end of the universe.
All of these objects travel at or near the speed of light. They don’t stop until they hit something. For people, that something can be any non-critical atom or it can be dna. If it’s dna that gets hit that cell can mutate or die. One neutron or alpha particle is probably not going to hurt you. “just as one bullet might miss. If someone points a machine gun, some bullets can miss, some can hit, and some can kill. Going and sitting in a uranium mine is like hanging out at a gun range.
“People say, ‘Well, you know, but you could get lung cancer.’ And I respond, ‘I’m 74. Who cares at this point?’” she said. “I’d rather take my chances with radon in terms of living with arthritis than with other Western medication.”
To use your analogy, there would have to be considerable evidence where hanging out at a gun range resulted in positive outcomes.
There plenty of natural experiments were a much higher background radiation does not have higher level of cancers. Some have lower levels.
The levels of energy of the various particle and gamma radiation vary significantly.
To use your analogy, it depends on whether people at the gun range are primarily shooting BB guns or high powered rifles.
Most hits with BB guns will not cause significant damage.
There is natural radiation everywhere. It is stupid to attempt to worry about radiation levels which do not increase dosage above natural radiation levels where no additional disease is found.
Ann Coulter wrote an interesting column on the possible benefits of exposure to low level radiation some years ago, suggesting it was a an example of hormesis. She cited the following example (which I borrowed from Wikipedia):
In Taiwan, recycled radiocontaminated steel was inadvertently used in the construction of over 100 apartment buildings causing the long-term (10 years) exposure of 10,000 people. The average dose rate was 50 mSv/year and a subset of the population (1,000 people) received a total dose of over 4,000 mSv over ten years. In the widely used linear no-threshold model (LNT) used by regulatory bodies, the expected cancer deaths in this population would have been 302 with 70 caused by the extra ionizing radiation with the remainder caused by natural background radiation. However the observed cancer rate was quite low at 7 cancer deaths when 232 would be predicted by the LNT model had they not been exposed to the radiation from the building materials. Ionizing radiation hormesis appears to be at work. Described by Professor Charles L. Sanders, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology.[24]
I think I’ll pass, thank you.
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