When cardiac CAT scans are used during an emergency situation,
they can provide critical diagnostic information about coronary
blood flow that can help save a patient’s life. This is the
moment in which this technology shines. Unfortunately, these
machines produce an astounding amount of radiation exposure for
the patient, often the equivalent of up to 750 chest X-rays. The
problem is that too many health care professionals casually
recommend these scans to patients who are asymptomatic and who
just want to know what’s going on inside their bodies. The
radiation exposure from these tests can often lead to DNA breaks
that may foster the initiation of cancer. The medical profession
may thus be on the verge of creating a dramatic increase in the
number of cancer cases due to excess use of diagnostic tests
that expose the patient to dangerously high levels of radiation.
In fact, some of these tests expose the patient to more
radiation than experienced by Japanese survivors of the atomic
bomb blasts at Hiroshima a