"A whole-body acute exposure to 5 grays or more of high-energy radiation usually leads to death within 14 days. LD1 is 2.5 Gy, LD50 is 5 Gy and LD99 is 8 Gy.[11] The LD50 dose represents 375 joules for a 75 kg adult. " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_(unit)#Radiation_poisonin...
Sievert (Sv) - measures biological damage. This accounts for the fact that different types of radiation and different tissues react differently. Think of this as the actual damage done.
The bullet's energy is identical in all cases (same Gy), but the biological damage varies wildly (different Sv).
The same energy deposited (Gy) causes vastly different biological damage (Sv) depending on:
What tissue (bone marrow is like your heart - critical; muscle is more resilient)
What radiation type (alpha particles are like hollow-point bullets - more damaging per energy unit; gamma rays are like full metal jacket - cleaner pass-through)
For most medical purposes (X-rays, gamma rays), 1 Gy is approx 1 Sv, which is why people use them interchangeably and add to confusion.
Location and delivery matter enormously. It's like pouring water. Put 3 liters in your lungs, you drown (dead). Put 3 liters on your hand, your hand gets wet (annoying but harmless).
3 Gy to your whole body at once is potentially fatal. You'll likely die within weeks from bone marrow failure, your blood cells can't regenerate. 3 Gy to a small tumor in your knee is a typical treatment session. The rest of your body gets almost nothing, and your bone marrow keeps working fine. 3 Gy spread over 6 sessions (0.5 Gy each) to a localized area is a very low dose that gives tissue time to repair.
Radon girls anyone ? /s
Though, at the ages when Osteoarthritis shows up, it might be better to take on a smaller risk of monitor-able extremity cancer than the pretty large QoL reduction of severe arthritis.
J. Frank Parnell (from the movie Repo Man).
>In this multicenter trial, researchers enrolled 114 patients with moderate-to-mild knee osteoarthritis across three academic centers in Korea. Participants were randomly assigned to receive one of two radiation regimens — a very low dose (0.3 Gy) or a low dose (3 Gy)
This is gamma. Those doses are "low" because delivery here is localized. If given full-body the 3Gy has something like 25-50% mortality.
The cancer patient are delivered like 20-80Gy into the tumor and surrounding tissues which just kills cells outright.
The point is that "radiation" is multiparametric.
Compare with the CTE, where a few bone-crushing traumas do not seem to cause it, but chronic long-term low grade impacts is more likely to cause it.
Another example, I probably could eat a massive amount of processed meat a few times without much ill effect, but years of eating moderate amounts might do you in.
The “small dose radiation is actually beneficial” part is pure conjecture, and almost certainly wrong. But unrelated to the issue of the validity of the linear model.
I stopped pretty much at that point.
Coal tar is technically carcinogenic, yes, but no study has found any association with cancer when used topically in low doses [1].
Coal tar's mechanism of action is thought to be carbazole, an aryl hydrocarbon. It is assumed to work through binding to the aryl hydrocarbon receptor, a relatively newly discovered immune cell regulator. Tapinarof (Vtama) is a new medication that also works on ArH and is really effective at reducing inflammation.
Coal tar was also used together with UVA light and psoralen (a light-sensitizing medication) to treat skin diseases like psoriasis, a protocol called Goeckerman therapy that's no longer commonly practiced. This combination does carry the risk of cancer, but it's probably due to the UVA and not the coal tar.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022202X1...
I am in my 50s and wonder from time to time what I would do if certain health-related events strike. For some, I have a well-defined solution (such as suicide for Alzheimer or ALS; or an active cure for cancers that have a fair chance of being fought). The more problematic ones are the ones fatal in long(er) term, with an aggressive and diminishing cure.
Dose can be controlled by switching off the forced ventilation and sealing the gas trap.
I'm not too surprised that this treatment works. It's essentially like localized steroids to just the joint- killing off the immune cells causing inflammation.
Good features is that it's localized (so no systemic immunosuppression) and the risk of cancer is low since you rarely get radiation-induced cancer in joints because there's not enough dividing cells. Unfortunately heading to radiotherapy is a logistical challenge, but there are enough people suffering from OA that would happily do this to get relief.
Are you confusing osteoarthritis with rheumatoid arthritis? I didn't think the pain of osteoarthritis had anything to do with the immune response. You've literally got bone rubbing against bone. It's not going to feel good.
Which countries is it a available/approved in?
"Phase III for Clinical Efficacy Trial – beginning in 2025
Our product MAG200 has successfully completed Phase I/II of a clinical trials on the use of allogeneic (donor) off-the-shelf stem cell therapy for OA. The pivotal Phase III trial is planned to commence in 2025."
why to web admins think this is acceptable for visitors?
Tom says that because that's the only radon cave that can turn the flow of radon on and off at will, it's the only place where you could (in theory) run a double-blind experiment on radon exposure therapy.
My question is: would it not be just as possible to do that in a laboratory setting? Surely there are already lab facilities in the world that are set up for double blind "exposure" experiments of that sort, with easy control of dosages, flow rates, etc. Is the problem that radon gas too expensive to harvest or store safely? Why is that cave the only feasible option?
EDIT: It now occurs to me that the answer could be "because the half life of radon is to short to transport it, so you would basically have to generate it in the lab by getting an enormous amount of uranium in one place and letting it decay and find some way of filtering the byproducts to isolate the radon in a way that putting it under a huge layer of bedrock does naturally." Sounds plausible to me, but does anyone know if that's the case?
Best as I can tell it's just something that is in that cave...seeping through the rocks etc.
It's simply the default that was decided on as the most conservative option possible, but that's pretty much it.
Radioactive baths have a rather long pedigree. In Jachymov, Czech Republic, they are used for over century. Sometimes they are even covered by health insurance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A9%C4%8Debn%C3%A9_l%C3%A1...
The conservative approach would be to assume low dose radiation has the maximum effect not ruled out by evidence. This would be higher than predicted by LNT.
Fasting does all those things, too -- without introducing random errors into one's DNA. Basically everyone under 40 should do regular fasts of some form, and those that do will probably derive no additional benefit from exposure to ionizing radiation, i.e., the type of radiation being promoted by the OP. (People older than 40 need to worry about losing muscle mass during a fast since old people find it very hard regain muscle mass once it it lost. Actually it is likely that only people over 60 or 65 might have to worry about muscle mass: experts disagree on the best cut-off age, and 40 years old's is the lowest I have seen.)
Three days of fasting has all of the benefits I list above, but there are risks to going completely without calories for that long, and actually our ancestors probably went without any access to calories for days almost never, but often endured stretches of days in which their calorie intake was less than a sustainable level, but not zero. To reduce the risks of going completely without calories for 3 days at a time, longevity researchers have devised the "fasting-mimicking diet", which give over the course of 5 days most or all of the benefits as eating no calories at all for 3 days. It restricts calories to about 800 calories per day with only 10% of that coming from protein and is the type of fasting that most people should be doing.
FMD requires no interaction with or prescription from the health-care industry and costs nothing except the time and attention needed to learn how to count calories if one has never done that before.
I'm extremely sceptical of claims of the form "basically everyone in [broad group] should do [medical intervention]", but you sound knowledgeable. Could you share your evidence, please?
Our ancestors were required to do hours per day of physical exertion just to stay alive. Because of technological progress, it is possible for most people these days to survive with very little exertion, but we now know that living this way (doing very little exertion) is bad for a person with the result that most of us should regularly exercise to maintain our health. Similarly our ancestors were required to endure periods of "calorie deficit" (eating fewer calories than would be survivable if the deficit went on indefinitely). The body uses these periods to disassemble damaged proteins inside cells (autophagy) and to get rid of unnecessary and damaged cells (apoptosis). When a person never undergoes a calorie deficit, these processes do not happen or happen to a much lesser degree than is optimal.
IIUC the main experimental evidence for the benefits of FMD come from an earlier protocol called "calorie restriction" in which the number of calories is kept constant and is a little lower (25% or 30% IIRC) than the individual would prefer to eat or that most Westerners actually eat. This protocol was found to extend life in mice significantly. Then someone found that fasting can improve the same biomarkers that calorie restriction improves (and consequently can be expected to have the same beneficial effects on longevity). But fasting by eating zero calories for days has adverse effects (including sudden death), starting a search for a diet that has the same beneficial effects on the biomarkers without the adverse effects of zero-calorie fasting.
Valter Longo is the longevity research who devised the FMD.
I am _not_ an expert or a professional in this field.
I decline your suggestion for me to look stuff up so that I can post the results here. I might have made the effort if my previous 2 comments had been upvoted significantly (which is the main way for me to tell whether readers value them) but both are sitting at a score of 1.
In no way is UV caused DNA damage good for a person in any dose. The effectiveness of this treatment has nothing to do with vitamin D generation or hormonal changes as far as I know. You have to damage your skin to somehow reset the immune system and get the result. It is a bargain with the devil as I think are many radiation based therapies. That doesn't mean they aren't useful.
nikolay•4mo ago
[0]: https://pavelbanyagrand.com/en/the-healing-mineral-water-in-...
Plankaluel•4mo ago
"It has been done for hundreds of years" isn't a good argument. There is a reason "Appeal to tradition" is one of the more famous logical fallacies.
Also: The radiation doses used in this trial are very likely much, much higher than what you would get from such a bath in radioactive water (otherwise the water would be so radioactive that staying in there or even drinking it would kill you very quickly), so this doesn't really tell us anything about whether the traditional modalities do anything or not. And yes, stuff like that also exists in Austria with Radon caves, and many other places.
vixen99•4mo ago
https://hal.science/hal-03025146v1/file/Petit%20et%20al%2020...
"Direct Meta-Analyses Reveal Unexpected Microbial Life in the Highly Radioactive Water of an Operating Nuclear Reactor Core"
https://journals.asm.org/doi/pdf/10.1128/spectrum.01995-22
"Culturomics of Bacteria from Radon-Saturated Water of the World’s Oldest Radium Mine"
groos•4mo ago
wat10000•4mo ago
Aeglaecia•4mo ago
justin66•4mo ago
kakacik•4mo ago
Then communists made local uranium mines/gulags for 'enemies of the state' which was basically a prolonged death sentence, many were just beaten to death or died from cold/starvation.
mionhe•4mo ago
clarionbell•4mo ago
bookofjoe•4mo ago
phoronixrly•4mo ago
> The mineral takes care of having radiant and beautiful skin, healthy bones and, of course, excellent brain functions.
Ah, yes, radiant skin.
zdragnar•4mo ago
An example here: https://www.radonmine.com/facility/
There's quite a few out that way.