KC Craichy talks with Dr. Patrick Purdue about the dangers of medical radiation.

Audio Transcription

KC: Welcome to Living Fuel TV. I’m KC Craichy. Think about this, it’s the middle of the night, you’ve just learned that your child has banged his head in sports, and they have rushed him to the emergency room. And they prescribed for him 500 x-rays, so every 15 minutes or every five minutes he’s going to get an x-ray, until they’re finished with 500 x-rays. And this is just so they can get the information to make them feel comfortable that everything is OK. Are you OK with that? Well, I’m excited to have special guest, Dr. Patrick Purdue. Dr. Purdue?

Dr. Purdue: Thank you.

KC: Is that essentially what they’re telling us?

Dr. Purdue: A CAT scan would be equivalent roughly to 500 chest x-rays of the patient.

KC: Five hundred chest x-rays.

Dr. Purdue: Yes.

KC: So it is not so unusual that you hear that you’ve had headaches, you’ve had an injury and they’ve prescribed a CAT scan, a CT-scan or some other kind of major radiation test. So what’s this doing to people?

Dr. Purdue: We’ve known since the study of survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II, that radiation causes cancer. There is a very interesting fellow, who died a couple years ago, his name is Dr. John Gofman, most people have never heard of him. He is the man who invented the process for manufacturing plutonium. He worked on the atom bomb project in World War II and he’s the co-discoverer of Uranium 233. After the war, he became a cardiologist and is the man credited with discovering HDL and LDL cholesterol. So he’s not a scientific lightweight.

KC: MD, PhD.

Dr. Purdue: He published a study in 1999. I believe I wrote that down for you, and I think you’ve got a copy of it now. It’s an entire book, it’s not just a paper.

KC: I have a couple of text books from him. One of them you referred me to.

Dr. Purdue: Yes.

KC: It’s massive.

Dr. Purdue: And in that book he clearly demonstrated that there is a direct correlation between the increased rates of metastatic cancers of all type and ischemic heart disease that is equivalent to the level of exposure of radiation that you have. So, in other words, the more radiation, you have the higher the risk of cancer and heart disease.

KC: And we’re talking about a lifetime load?

Dr. Purdue: Life, it never goes away.

KC: So I believe it’s Gofman’s textbook talks about dosage for 16 frames for a dental x-ray and then regular x-rays and then CT-scans and so on, that over a lifetime just a woman over a 20 year period that does annual mammography, it’s an equivalent dose to being one mile from Hiroshima when the bomb went off.

Dr. Purdue: Yeah. Dr. Samuel Epstein, who’s the Dean of the University of Illinois School of Public Health, published a study in the Journal of Applied Radiation several years ago, that showed that a woman who gets ten mammograms has one half the radiation equivalent of standing one mile from the center of the Hiroshima bomb blast. So that can’t be good. A lot of what I hear from patients is that they’re told by their physicians who are prescribing mammograms that it’s really not that bad. One mammogram is roughly equivalent to the radiation you would get if you fly from Tampa to Los Angeles. That’s true, but the problem is total load, it’s the accumulation over a lifetime, so flying, plus mammograms, plus whatever x-rays you’ve had, it’s all plus, plus, plus, no one knows what dosage level you have. When I began to look into all this stuff a number of years ago and began to do some research on it and so forth, I finally became convinced that it would be a very rare day that I would recommend a radiological study to a patient. So now, everything I do is either MRI or ultrasound, which are safe. The’s no radiation involved.

KC: Or thermography.

Dr. Purdue: Or thermography, exactly. To back up some of these numbers, like Dr. Samuel Epstein, Dr. Gofman, in the Archives of Internal Medicine two years ago a study was published that showed that out of a group of women who avoided mammograms, there was 25% fewer breast cancers. So when you just look at the accumulation of literature, study after study, it begins to add up to saying, “Well, gee whiz, maybe that’s not really a good idea to give so much radiation.”

KC: Clearly. I mean you really have to take this into your own hands. This is so important that you understand that medical radiation is no benign. It’s not OK to get 16 frame dental x-ray every time your child goes to the dentist. This adds up over a lifetime. We talked about mammography. You know recently they changed the recommendation from every year to every other year. From after age 40 it was every year and now it’s after age 50 every other year. Is that correct?

Dr. Purdue: That’s true. Based on data that’s over ten years old, by the way.

KC: Well, the outrage was amazing to me. The outrage was you’re taking away our tests. All the news reporters, including some of the ones that I respect, they came out with this outrage that it’s just the medical system trying to save money, that they’re trying to save money by pushing off our mammograms to age 50 and giving it every other year at that point. But the truth is, it was an independent scientific council that came to that conclusion with overwhelming evidence of harm.

Dr. Purdue: Exactly.

KC: So what’s a woman to do? Thermography really is a very good thing to do after age what?

Dr. Purdue: Obviously after age 40, unless there’s other risk factors involved.

KC: Well, breast thermography is more widely available now if you just Google it in your area or any search engine. You’ll generally find some practitioners with breast thermography. Now it isn’t a single test that gives you an outcome, it’s a series that just shows the changes, right? So thermography actually shows the heat of growth of a foreign object growing in the breast.

Dr. Purdue: Yeah. Thermography does not image the tissue in the breast, but it’s a very good screening tool because it’s totally safe, and it gives us an idea of whether there’s an area that may be a problem that we need to investigate further. If that shows up, then we can image safely at the tissue in the breast with either a diagnostic breast ultrasound or breast MRI. Both of which are totally safe, no radiation involved. And I certainly negotiated with providers in my area to where we can get the cost of these imagining services way down. It doesn’t have to be expensive.

KC: That’s really important. So when you have a choice, listen, when you think about a CT-scan, a PET scan, a CAT scan, these things are hundreds of times the radiation dose of a conventional x-ray.

Dr. Purdue: Correct.

KC: A chest x-ray no less, hundreds of times. So if you’re having headaches and you’re doctor says, “Well, let’s get you a CT-scan.” You run to a different doctor because this is very dangerous. So if you’re told to get a CT-scan, ask yourself if you’re OK with running down to the imaging center and getting 500 x-rays to your head. If you’re not OK with that, then you probably ought to demand MRI, or ultrasound, or thermography, depending on which is clinically accurate. And this is really important, this is not you practicing medicine on your own, this is using wisdom. And this is the doctor’s own medical journals that are saying this. I know a lot of MDs who agree with this, who know that this is over prescribed. In fact, I’ll finish by saying that Bottom Line Health came out with something this week where they actually reduced the dose 90% of a CT-scan, and they were able to get the same information, 90% reduction. Now we had talked on this show a year ago about dialing it down 50%, and we know that in California there was a medical center who, when people were getting a CT- scan, after the scan their hair was falling out. They realized that it was dialed up way beyond what was OK. And they did 600 more patients with that before they turned it back down even though they knew this was going on. So this is a really important subject. We have a section on our site for medical radiation which you can look at our past shows on the subject and links and so on. We strongly encourage you to do that. Hope you enjoyed it. God bless you.

Dr. Purdue: Thank you very much.

KC: And God bless you. Have a great day.