Re: Eye & Thyroid Protection in Fluoroscopy

[Mark Steinbuchel <markst@ONC.hhsys.org>]

Disagree, Thyroid CA can kill and rarely do you see a primary site 
malignant neoplasm stay encapsulated - postmortum diagnosis of brain, 
pancreas and other mets have shown the tissue type was from a thyroid 
primary site is not any comfort to the patient or anyone else. This brings 
me to my biggest beef about our medical physics profession.  I bust my tail 
with American Cancer Society Relay for Life and similar fundraisers but we 
have the technology now to detect most cancers in their earliest stages but 
our third party providers will not pay for private, middle income and poor 
to receive simple nuclear medicine and other diagnostic testing on a 
routine basis because of costs.  Yet the Executive Payroll folks in our 
government can go to Walter Reed or Bethesda and recieve annual "free-we 
pay" physicals and all the public hears is the press release about how a 
non-malignant tumor was removed from ____ today and his longterm outlook is 
to be "cancer free".  Well you can too if you get this same level of 
medical monitoring.  Society needs to correct this and then we can say 
statements like "...risk of death is very low."  Until then Sandy, you 
should treat thyroid cancer as having the potential to kill.
On Wed, 8 Jul 1998 13:00:56 -0700 Sandy Perle <sandyfl@earthlink.net> wrote:

> > Is the thyroid really a "radiosensitive organ"?  Even if cancer develops
> > the risk of death is very low-- if I recall, the risk of death is on the
> > order of 5% or less.  ICRP 60 has some good numbers on this.
> 
> At worse, the thryoid can be removed, and the individual placed on
> medication. The thyroid is a critical organ for exposure to I-
> 131(internal deposition), but should not be from 70 to 100 kvp x-
> rays.
> 
> ------------------
> Sandy Perle