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Risk communication in the medical radiological practice
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Dr. Kazuko Ohno
Professor, Kyoto College of Medical Science, Japan |
| Among various applications of radiation the medical application belongs to the oldest ones. It has been developed and widely used as a physically weakly invasive method of diagnostics and medical treatment in order to protect the health of patients. However, some of the patients feel uneasy, because they have unnecessary fear of radiation exposure. The impact of radiation on children and pregnant women, as well as a cancer-causing potential for middle-aged and elderly people are the most common concerns. In practice, it often happens that the fear of their own diseases or the frustration with the medical staff moves on to a different dimension, such as the fear of radiation exposure. In some cases people confuse the exposure to the atomic bomb with that to the medical radiation treatment, because there is a lack of information. In other cases an inadequate behavior of the medical staff at the initial phase of the treatment amplifies the fear in patients. In this lecture I will present some concrete methods for coping with such fear of radiological exposure on the basis of typical examples. These were extracted from many questions posed to the Japan Radiological Society. This way, I would like to help to decrease the number of patients who have fear of radiation exposure and, furthermore, to contribute to the continuous development and prevalence of safe and reliable radiological practice. |
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