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X-Rays: A MAjOR CAUSE OF CANCER AND HEART DISEASE? CAUSE X-RAYS: MAJOR CANCER DISEASE? HEART AND Medical X-rays may be responsible for a large proportion of cancer and coronary heart disease cases. hen Wilhelm Roentgen discovered X-rays in 1895, "doctors and physicians saw the practical potential of X-rays at once, and rushed to experiment with them".' Many physicians built their own X-ray equipment, with mixed results: some home-brew X-ray machines produced no radiation whatsoev- er; others produced enough to irradiate everyone in the next room. The ability to see inside the human body for the first time was a marvellous, mysterious and deeply provocative discovery. Roentgen trained X-rays on his wife's hand for 15 minutes, producing a macabre image of the bones of her hand adorned by her wedding ring. Roentgen's biographer, Otto Glasser, says Mrs Roentgen "...could hardly believe that this bony hand was her own and shuddered at the thought that she was seeing her skeleton. To Mrs Roentgen, as to many others later, this experience gave a vague premo- nition of death," Glasser wrote.’ Within the year, physicians were using X-rays for diagnosis and as a new way of gath- ering evidence to protect themselves against malpractice suits. Almost immediately— during 1895-96—it also became clear that X-rays could cause serious medical problems. Some physicians received burns that wouldn't heal, requiring amputation of their fingers. Others developed fatal cancers. At that time, antibiotics had not yet been discovered, so physicians had only a small number of treatments they could offer their patients. X-rays gave them a range of new procedures that were very “high tech"—bordering on the miraculous—and which seemed to hold out promise to the sick. Thus the medical world embraced these mysterious, invisible rays with great enthusiasm. Understandably, physicians at the time often thought they observed therapeutic benefits, where controlled experiments today find none. Just prior to 1920, the editor of American X-Ray Journal said "there are about 100 named diseases that yield favorably to X-ray treatment". In her informative history of the technology, Multiple Exposures: Chronicles of the Radiation Age, Catherine Caufield (see REHW, nos. 200-202) comments on this period:* "Radiation treatment for benign [non-cancer] diseases became a medical craze that lasted for 40 or more years... [L]arge groups of people [were] needlessly irradiated for such minor problems as ringworm and acne... Many women had their ovaries irradiated as a treatment for depression." Such uses of X-rays would today be viewed as quackery, but many of them were accepted medical practice into the 1950s. Physicians weren't the only ones enthusiastic about X-ray therapies. If you get a large enough dose of X-rays, your hair falls out—so, Caufield reports, "beauty shops installed X-ray equipment to remove their customers’ unwanted facial and body hair". Roentgen's discovery of X-rays in 1895 led directly to Henri Becquerel's discovery of the radioactivity of uranium in 1896, and then to the discovery of radium by Marie Curie and her husband Pierre in 1898—for which Becquerel and the Curies were jointly award- ed the Nobel Prize in 1903. (Twenty years later, Madame Curie would die of acute lym- phoblastic leukaemia.) Soon, alongside X-rays, radioactive radium was being prescribed by physicians. Radium treatments were prescribed for heart trouble, impotence, ulcers, depression, arthritis, cancer, high blood pressure, blindness and tuberculosis, among other ailments. Soon radioactive toothpaste was being marketed, then radioactive skin cream. In Germany, chocolate bars containing radium were sold as a "rejuvenator".* In the USA, hundreds of thousands of people began drinking bottled water laced with radium, as a general elixir known popularly as "liquid sunshine". As recently as 1952, Life magazine by Peter Montague © 2000 Editor Rachel's Environment & Health Weekly Environmental Research Foundation POB 5036, Annapolis, MD 21403, USA E-mail: erf@rachel.org Website: www.monitor.net/rachel/ NEXUS - 33 by Peter Montague © 2000 AUGUST - SEPTEMBER 2000