Would you take your same condescending tone against the 4 UCSF medical school professors who raised concerns about the backscatter x-rays? [1]
Their contention is that the argument that the backscatter x-rays are 1/200th of the dose you get from cosmic radiation on a flight is invalid, as the backscatter x-ray is specifically designed to direct the radiation to a very thin layer of surface tissue, whereas cosmic radiation is distributed throughout the entire body.
Yes, these professors were refuted by other UCSF radiology professors [2], but the science will not be settled until an independent study is conducted of the machines given the context of their potential for misuse and mis-calibration by individuals who are not radiology technicians.
So if you don't want your comment to come off as offensive, perhaps it would be wise to not start off with "Are you making this up, ill-informed or do you not understand physics and radiation?"
Thanks for chiming in matey, I take it you're a contrarian?
You pretty much back up my point. People who don't know the science should not comment in alarmist tones about it.
Fearmongering generally does more harm than good. In this case it seems like everyone hates the TSA, hates the full body scanners, objects to being dosed with radiation, and so psychogenic illnesses are claimed to be caused by the machine.
So the claims are false, the machines work like they're supposed to, it's just no one wants them there so hurdles are placed in the way of their implementation. Hurdles that are false.
I don't disagree that we should look further into the use, especially as I say above because there are other methods that do not use ionising radiation that seem to be just as effective
So yes, I would take the same attitude to the 3 UCSF Med school professors, just as I have to the world-famous neurosurgeon who told me as we microwaved our food in between surgeries that I had to 'wait for 3 seconds after it finishes or else the rays escape and can increase your risk for cancer' or the former head of the AMA who said during a lecture that 'there is a study that shows that homeopathy is active against cancer' with no supporting evidence. Position and title generally only qualify a person to make comments in a specific domain, as those 3 professors discovered when they got smacked down by the radiologists.
If people want to believe weird and wacky things, that's fine. If those things contravene the known laws of physics, then either there must be some spectacular evidence, at which point I will believe anything, or it simply isn't true.
Their contention is that the argument that the backscatter x-rays are 1/200th of the dose you get from cosmic radiation on a flight is invalid, as the backscatter x-ray is specifically designed to direct the radiation to a very thin layer of surface tissue, whereas cosmic radiation is distributed throughout the entire body.
Yes, these professors were refuted by other UCSF radiology professors [2], but the science will not be settled until an independent study is conducted of the machines given the context of their potential for misuse and mis-calibration by individuals who are not radiology technicians.
So if you don't want your comment to come off as offensive, perhaps it would be wise to not start off with "Are you making this up, ill-informed or do you not understand physics and radiation?"
[1] http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ost...
[2] http://blogs.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2010/11/tsa_scanner_cont...