How harmful is the radiation from a CT scan?

How harmful is the radiation from a CT scan?

Not very, just like smoking

Are you the sinus guy from a few days ago?

acute doses of x-ray/gamma radiation below like 10 mSv are not harmful at all. It was shown from the atomic bomb blasts(acute dose of x-ray radiation you'd get just like a CT scan or x-ray) to not be harmful. all doses under 5 mSv had zero excess cancers compared to regular populations not exposed.

it was shown last year that in old people, CT scans of the chest below 7.5 mSv had no detectable DNA damage

it was shown in another study that the LOWEST average dose for a solid cancer was like 35 mSv, much higher than any CT scan. most CT scans are of the head(angled away from the eyes), one of the least radio-sensitive parts of the body, at like 2 mSv or less, not high enough to do jack shit even in an acute dose. we used to give adult doses to children in the 80s and 90s.

there is no way the doses you receive in a CT scan cause cancer. it has never ever been shown in decades it has been researched. it's harmful maybe if you're a small child and you're receiving a dozen scans in the same spot, but otherwise, there's no way

here is a second table. they don't even include the 5 mSv and under group because there was no excess, and the vast majority of the 5+ mSv group excess is at the high end, nearing 100 mSv.

Depends on how high the dose is. At low dose levels (< 100 mSv), the distinction between acute vs non-acute exposures doesn't matter. The cancer risk from an effective dose of 2 mSv is the same whether it was received from a CT scan or from natural background radiation.

The comparison of low level exposures to background radiation is just a simplification for the general public who would either quickly lose interest or go into panic mode if we were to try to explain all the nuances involved in radiation biology. I've had patients express relief as well as go into panic mode on me when I tried to explain the how low the risks were from their diagnostic scan. True, it's not completely accurate, but the primary purpose for the comparison is to provide some perspective.

t. Imaging Physicist

If you went through ten times in a row, you'd look like pic related...

No single scan is dangerous at all, otherwise they would not exist. People greatly overestimate the dangers of radiation and think a silly dental bitewing or airport backscatter scanner is going to kill them. Only medical physicists can really explain why it is or isn't dangerous and it would absolutely never ever be used if it was thought to be dangerous in the doses that these procedures are administered in.

Fucking lethal, OP. I knew a guy that got a chest CT then a few hours later he chocked to death. Doctors insist that the two are unrelated, but seriously whats the probability of two unrelated events happening together?

>he chocked to death

chocking to death sounds really awful.