Nuclear medicine is a topic that I have not covered in much detail here on Atomic Insights, mainly because my formal medical training is limited to first aid learned as a lifeguard and as a first responder on damage control teams in the Navy. However, several commenters have asked me to increase the nuclear medicine coverage, so I am working to learn more and find good sources that might be interested in providing guest posts.
One of the sources I am developing sent me a link to this encouraging video. Like most of you, I have known a number of people over the years who have battled lung cancer, often unsuccessfully. It is a horrible way to die, so any therapies that can improve the chances of success and reduce the side effects of the battle are worth developing and employing. You can read more about lung brachytherapy at Significant advances in lung cancer treatments and outcomes.
The fact is that there are a number of conditions, including infections, which can and have been effectively treated by radiation. As far back a the First World War, high dose X-ray exposure was used to treat gas gangrene very successfully in the absence of antibiotics which were not available until well after that conflict.
I have been trying to get a coherent answer from nuclear medicine and radio therapy professionals why this treatment has at least not been tried in cases of antibiotic resistant conditions like Necrotizing Fasciitis, which is often fatal, or survived only after radical amputation, but to date I have yet to get an explanation beyond being told it wasn’t done.
I have an acoustic neuroma non-cancer brain tumor that was treated at the Mayo Clinic with gamma radiation. Thanks to the gamma knife I was able to skip very serious brain surgery and am doing fine. A doctor who wanted to operate told me that I may get brain cancer from the radiation. The doc at Mayo said the chances of brain cancer were 1 in 100, the chances of dying on the table while under the literal knife were more like 1 in 50. So I voluntarily stuck my head in a cave like machine where I was exposed to high levels of gamma radiation and am doing fine.
The benefits of low-level radiation were strongly hinted at in a recently completed US National Cancer Institute (NCI) study of 53,000 heavy smokers with high risk for lung cancer. http://fusione.altervista.org/low_dose_nuclear_radiation_may_reduce_lung_cancer_deaths.htm
Although this post is quite old, I have just seen it and I think that some material I have read previously regarding this issue may be helpful.
I am talking about the existence of actual radiation therapy treatments involving whole-body low-dose irradiation applied either instead of or in addition to conventional radiation therapy.
Patient survival rates seem to indicate that they are significantly more successful than conventional techniques.
This article is probably an interesting example:
http://ukpmc.ac.uk/articles/PMC2477707/pdf/hormes-05-26.pdf
@Francesc
Thank you for the link to the article about whole body dose radiation treatments. There is a reason why I leave the comments open for older articles; sometimes the conversation gets going again after someone finds the article interesting and contributes something new.
I hope you will take the time to poke around the recent discussions about radiation health effects and the lack of evidence that radiation is actually a carcinogen at the doses and dose rates that the general public might receive from nuclear energy applications under all conceivable conditions. (I realize that workers have the potential for being exposed at levels high enough to cause injury, illness, and death, but the maximum doses to the public are many orders of magnitude lower.)