A new paper promoting the health benefits of low doses of radiation has been published in a medical journal known for taking politically conservative positions.
The article, published in the winter issue of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons (Vol. 22:4, pp. 105-110), reviews literature on the effects of low-dose radiation. The author concludes that the widely held belief that "there is no safe dose of radiation" is false. The article was written by Bobby R. Scott, PhD, scientist emeritus at Lovelace Respiratory Research Institute in Albuquerque, NM.
He goes on to review the adaptive response theory of radiation exposure, which posits that exposure to very low doses of radiation can actually enhance the body's natural defenses, according to Scott. Under this theory, radiation exposure can activate the body's ability to repair double-strand DNA breaks, which occur more frequently as radiation exposure rises.
Scott believes this trend has led to the "false belief that cancer induction is also a linear no-threshold function of radiation dose, i.e., that any dose can increase the risk of cancer." Instead, he posits that low levels of radiation exposure produce a "protective natural barrier to mutation-related harm."
Another paper in the same issue of the journal examines the linear no-threshold theory from the perspective of thyroid cancer screening. The authors claim that thyroid cancer screening "leads to enormous overdiagnosis" because it detects indolent cancers, mostly the papillary type, that will not progress to lethal cancer. This can lead to unnecessary procedures such as thyroidectomy.
The authors of that paper also claim that low-dose radiation is safe, and they even suggest that exposure levels below 500 mSv are safe for children.
The Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons is published by the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, which in the past has staked out a number of conservative positions on health issues, such as the belief that HIV does not cause AIDS, that being gay reduces life expectancy, and that there is a link between breast cancer and autism, according to the Wikipedia page on the group.
