<span title="Career?????????????????????????">Career???????????????????...</span>

Question

Okay so I'm a sophomore in high school, and lately ive been thinking alot about what I want to do in college. I was thinking about beings a Lab Technician where I could take X-rays and ultrasounds but then I kept hearing that that's not a good one because I would always be around radiation and when i get old it would be bad for my health. So i want to be a nurse of some sort, the thing is I dont like injecting things into people or cleaning up their "messes' in the hospital and doing things like that. what kind of nurse can i be? I'd really like to work at a children's hospital, if not a nurse than maybe one of those kid counsel ours that talk and hang out with the sick kids to make them feel a little better, cause i remember ppl like that coming in when I was sick in the hospital.

Answer 1

To clarify, a lab technician does not do ultrasounds or x-rays.  A radiologic technologist does x-ray examinations and a sonographer does ultrasounds (which does not use ionizing radiation, but sound waves, hence NO health dangers).  Cancer rates for a RT are the same as any other career.  We do not have higher cancer rates.  We are aware of the dangers of radiation, and we do not put ourselves in a position where we are at risk.  If there were health risks, who in the world would go to school to become a RT?

&quot;QUESTION:  Are there any short-term effects of radiation to the radiographers if they don&#039;t follow the imaging procedure? If yes, what are they? Are there any risks of cancer? Are there any case studies of it?

AThere is no risk of acute effects from exposure from diagnostic x-ray equipment. There are threshold doses for these effects, generally a few Gy, delivered at high dose rates. Diagnostic equipment will overheat and fail long before delivering doses in this range. There is a theoretical risk of cancer from small doses of radiation, such as might be encountered by radiographers/technologists in the operation of diagnostic equipment. A few old studies show statistically significant associations between occupational exposure and cancer in radiologists. The exposures occurred many years ago, when equipment was much cruder and occupational dose limits were nonexistent. No such associations have been identified from exposures since World War II. I am not aware of any such associations for radiographers from exposure at any time. The risk of cancer is minimal to nonexistent from occupational exposures below current dose limits. Current data show that virtually all radiology personnel can perform their duties while holding their occupational doses well below the limit. The best way to insure that this occurs is for all personnel to wear their personal dose monitors correctly.

S. Julian Gibbs, DDS, PhD&quot;&#039;

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&quot;QUESTION:  QI&#039;m interested in becoming an x-ray technologist and I would like to know about the specific hazards of being exposed to radiation. Is the career a safe one?

ANSWER:  That&#039;s a great question. When I started college, I went for two years to become an x-ray technologist. It was only AFTER I got into the profession that I started asking more about radiation exposure and biological effects for me and for the patients. That&#039;s how I got into health physics (radiation safety). It appears that you&#039;ve thought about the same questions but in advance!

A general answer to your question is, &quot;Yes, the career is a safe one.&quot; You will, however, certainly be in a position to get higher exposures if regulations and standard precautions are not followed. When they are followed, you should receive less than one-tenth of the annual radiation exposure limit for radiation workers. That limit is 5,000 mrem per year (mrem is a unit of radiation dose). Even though that limit exists, institutions using radiation for diagnosis, therapy, or research have policies to keep exposures to their staff and patients as low as possible.

You might want to visit the Nuclear Regulatory Commission&#039;s Web site and look at a regulatory guide on occupational exposure—click on Regulatory Guide 8.29. Just to give you an idea, I work at a large medical center. We have over 41,000 employees and about 3,000 wear a dosimeter to determine how much radiation they receive. The Radiology Department here performs over 1.6 million x-ray procedures a year. The average annual exposure to one of our x-ray technologists is about 80 mrem, well below the limit of 5,000 mrem. The 80 mrem is an average—there are some who receive no exposure because they work in areas where they are never in the room during an exposure and there are some who might receive a couple hundred mrem per year because their work involves being in the room almost constantly when fluoroscopy procedures are taking place. This latter group keeps their exposure low by wearing lead aprons and keeping away from the patient as much as possible during the fluoroscopy procedure (during a fluoroscopy procedure, the patient is your source of exposure unless a portion of your body is in the direct beam).

On a broader scale, below is a reference that indicated for the period 1985-1989, the average annual effective dose to monitored workers in diagnostic radiology was about 500 mrem. This was a decrease of nearly 400 mrem—from 900 mrem in the period 1975-1989. Both of these are still below the annual limit and show a decreasing trend in the amount of occupational exposure received by an x-ray technologist even though the number of x-ray procedures are on the increase.

Kelly Classic

Certified Medical Health Physicist &quot;

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