A LNT Experience

[RuthWeiner@AOL.COM]

I have just had the following experience that has brought home to me once again the poor risk choices forced on us by slavish adherence to the linear non-threshold theory:


I have a very painful abscessed tooth, and went to see my dentist today for a root canal.  He took an x-ray, and on the first x-ray really couldn't see the abscess, so he took a second x-ray, which showed it somewhat more clearly, but he still had to open up the tooth to make surethat it wasn't a sinus infection of some sort  (it was an abscess and yes I just had a root canal).  The tie-in with the LNT is that, because of his patients' fears of cancer, he uses extremely fast film, which does not have the definition of the slightly slower film.  So he had to take the second x-ray (which sort of defeated the advantage of the lower definition film anyway) and then had to take a chance drilling through a crown into a healthy tooth.  Ironically, I had a regular checkup last month, and had his technician been using higher-definition film, the infection might have been caught much earlier.  Even if I had still had to have the root canal, it might hav!

e saved me a few days of intense pain.  By the way, he agrees with me entirely about the foolishness of forcing the use of lower-definition film.  Thank you, I'll happily take the putative risk that goes along with better-definition x-ray film!


Here we have x-ray, one of the most fantastic diagnostic tools ever invented, and we are hampering its use because of groundless fears brought on by a theory that has had no direct experimental confirmation, and precious little indirect evidence, of its validity.   Is this happening elsewhere in medical and dental practice?  Isn't it time we took a public stand on this?


Ruth Weiner, Ph. D.

ruthweiner@aol.com