Thyroid medical scans use radioactive dye, now linked to permanent thyroid damage

Wednesday, February 01, 2012 by: Jonathan Benson, staff writer
Tags: thyroid, medical scans, radioactive

(NaturalNews) Cardiac computed tomography (CT) and other medical scans sometimes involve injecting a radioactive iodide dye into the bloodstreams of patients in order to highlight the produced images. But a new study published in the journal Archives of Internal Medicine has revealed that this radioactive dye can cause permanent thyroid damage, as well as cancer.

For his study, Dr. Steven Brunelli from Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Mass., collected data on 400 patients treated at his hospital who ended up developing over- or under-active thyroids. He then compared this data to that of 1,400 similar patients that had normal thyroid function, and made correlations based on who had undergone scans involving radioactive iodide dye.

He found that those with over-active thyroid, also known as hyperthyroidism, were twice as likely as others to have undergone an iodide dye-based CT scan. Those with even more severe thyroid problems or diseases were even more likely to have undergone the toxic scan, indicating a probable connection between the two.

It would seem obvious that pumping doses of radioactive iodide dye hundreds of times higher than the maximum recommended daily exposure level of 150 micrograms (mcg) into patients' veins is a bad idea on all accounts. After all, the thyroid gland will uptake radioactive iodide in place of nutritive iodine when too much of it is present, which was a primary concern after the Fukushima nuclear disaster (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific...).

But some 80 million doses of iodide dye are administered to patients worldwide every single day, according to Reuters Health, despite the fact that there are much safer scanning methods available. And Dr. Brunelli, who admits that thyroid disease is responsible for a host of illnesses including heart disease, high blood pressure, weight problems, and sexual and psychological dysfunction says patients should still take the dye if their doctors recommend it to them.

"All of these thyroid diseases are eminently treatable," said Dr. Brunelli to Reuters Health in an effort to actually try to defend the toxic and needless scans. But is this really true? And would you really want to risk your long-term health just because your ignorant doctor tells you that injecting radioactive poison into your bloodstream is necessary to detect heart disease?

As we noted in a recent article, thyroid disease is on the rise, and radiation is a primary factor in this rise (https://www.naturalnews.com/034758_thyroid_ca...). With this in mind, it is sheer lunacy to continue recommending toxic, radioactive dye injections when simple blood tests or ultrasounds can do the trick much more safely.

Sources for this article include:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/01/24/us...