Re: Informed Consent

[Mike Lantz <mlantz33@cybertrails.com>]

If the nuclear medicine community would read what Bob wrote here, they might come to realize how much help they could be to the PUBLIC; and therefore to health physicists across the US.  We have so many people that cannot be convinced, cannot be educated, cannot taught at work that 24 nCi on or in them will be of minimal risk.  Not without an outside perspective.  However, if they had been shown that people every day across the US receive for example 24,000,000 nCi for diagnostic evaluations, perspective can grow.

" I can't think of a better way to show the public that we can live just fine with radioactivity than to have them understand how commonly they encounter it. " 

Thanks for writing Bob.  It seems to me that this thread could be pulled a little more.  A cooperative effort between HP's, CIH's, physicians, radiologists, etc might actually teach.  It seems like it's really up to the medical community to want to do this.  

Mike Lantz

----------
From: 	Bob Flood
Sent: 	Monday, May 10, 1999 5:34 PM
To: 	Multiple recipients of list
Subject: 	Re: Informed consent

At 04:24 PM 5/10/99 -0500, you wrote:
>
>Current regs and procedures require that patients be 
>informed of risks that have a reasonable chance of 
>occurring--but not all infinitesimally small risks.  It is 
>simply not possible to discuss everything with every 
>patient.

I agree with this, BUT ...

The value of informing the patient is more qualitative than quantitative.
If the patient is simply informed that radioactive material is being in the
test or treatment, and that the quantity of radioactivity has been judged
to be acceptable by the medical experts at the hospital, that would be
sufficient - in my opinion. I say this because, if we had patients being
informed like this, after a while we'd have a NATION of people who either
have had such tests/treatments themselves or who know someone or several
someones who have. Without realizing it they will come to understand that
radiation is being used and people are NOT dying all over the place, and
the doom&gloom anti's will have are much harder time convincing (scaring)
people with the idea that every photons a killer and no amount of money is
too much to spend to clean up small amount of radioactive material.

People believe that the presence of even a trivial amount of radioactivity
in their immediate vicinity is a dangerous anomaly, and that makes it
easier to scare them. They need to understand how common it really is and
that we seem to survive anyway. I can't think of a better way to show the
public that we can live just fine with radioactivity than to have them
understand how commonly they encounter it.

===================================
Bob Flood
Dosimetry Group Leader
Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
(650) 926-3793
bflood@slac.stanford.edu
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