Posted by pseudolus 4 days ago
Not if you fly decent distances a dozen times a year or more.
Of course, rationally speaking, I think at the individual level it's hard to really gauge this any more than any other residual risk factor. You could get very unlucky with cell damage from anything, more radiation just gives you more tickets to the lottery. I'm sure other factors play a role on an individual level and the risk to each person is not static.
[1]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9447865/#:~:text=Pi...
CTs may not cause significant amounts of wrist/knee cancer - I can't speak either way on that - but that wouldn't mean they're 100% safe elsewhere. For starters, wrist/knee imaging needs less radiation - they're relatively thin parts of the body, and relatively small regions.
Move along...
CT scans are likely overused; my spouse has several chronic conditions and after receiving dozens a year for a while, we started asking if a CT was clinically indicated, or just precautionary. Mostly the response is "just in case". I wish EMRs did a better job of highlighting how many CTs someone's had recently for this sort of decision making.
There've also long been problems with kids getting unnecessarily high adult doses of radiation. My dad's a peds radiologist and was heavily involved in the founding of https://www.imagegently.org/.
Two weeks of physical therapy and I was fine.
At the time I was mad about the money, now I'm just thinking "what a dumb way to (maybe) get gut cancer."
I was young. I thought I was scheduled for an MRI like the one I had for my sinuses. I didn't even know what a was CT at the time.
http://npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/04/16/g-s1-60...
Though when I asked they said it was like a long flight trip to aroynd the globe. While I don't believe that, I do believe that they are much more effective than they were 10+ years ago. Also I wouldn't have got my stomach surgery without my first one.
It's a shame our medical systems invested so heavily into CT machines at the expense of MRI's
In practice a CT machine is also a much better workhorse for innumerable tasks that are very hard to effectively investigate with an MR machine, as MR imaging takes significantly more time, and requires more technical knowhow among the medical staff involved.