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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lady Lurksalot who wrote (21400)	5/7/1998 2:50:00 PM
From: LoLoLoLita	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

Holly, I think that any doctor who told a child that she was likely to get cancer as a result of X-rays administered by said doctor is not only irresponsible, but cruel as well. However, struggling to make sense of this story, maybe there was a discussion of what is termed the "latency period" for cancer induction: the latency period is the elapsed time between exposure to a carcinogenic insult (such as radiation) and the development of clinical signs of cancer. Some cancers develop faster than others, e.g. lymphomas and thyroid cancers tend to develop faster than bone and lung cancers. In terms of cancer induction from a given amount of radiation, children are more sensitive to radiation than adults. That is, if an adult and a child are given the same dose, we would estimate a higher cancer risk for the child. At the very extreme of old age, very high radiation exposures can result in only very small risk of cancer development, because the person is more likely to die of other causes. No one can know if their exposure to radiation will cause cancer. Doctors who tell these types of frightening fairy tales to children are irresponsible, to say the least. David