To put the risk for medical radigraphic procedures proper prepective, consider the following that appeared in the American Journal of Radiology: 177, July 2001.
"Skin Injuries from Fluoroscopically Guided Procedures:
Part 1, Characteristics of Radiation Injury"
Titus R. Koenig, Detlev Wolff, Fred A. Mettler, Louis K. Wagner
"Interventional procedures in radiology and cardiology often involve high radiation doses to patients’ skin. The potential for skin injury was discussed in 1994 [1]. More than 70 injuries have been reported in the referenced literature during the last decade or are known through other sources such as unpublished research and legal records [2–27] (Tables 1 and 2).
The incidence of radiation injuries is small compared with the number of procedures performed. More than 700,000 interventional cardiologic and other procedures are now performed each year [28, 29]. A serious injury can be debilitating, requiring a prolonged course of intense care that sometimes lasts for years [23, 24]. Severe skin injuries, like chronic ulceration and necrosis, are documented in 38 of the 73 cases that we reviewed [30]. Skingrafts were required in 18 patients, three of whom needed a repeated procedure after the first graft failed [23, 24] (Table 2, patient 14).
In a message dated 5/21/2003 10:41:37 AM Pacific Standard Time, LGrimm@FACNET.UCLA.EDU writes:
IRs as a group had more overexposures than any other group of radioactive material users, and probably still do.
I have a quick caveat to insert here, and that is, if you look at cardiologists, you may find comparable rates of overexposures from the procedures they perform using x-ray producing machines. We tend to focus on the dangers of radioactive materials, and forget the dangers of machine use. I believe that this is due, in part, to the fact that we have a comprehensive national program to address RAM use, but that radiation machine use is not so consistently nor comprehensively regulated.
Barbara