Word: ct
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Barack Obama [AK, AL, CO, CT, DE, GA, ID, IL, KS, MO, MN, ND, UT] held his own, making significant inroads among southern white men, especially in Georgia. He trounced Clinton in his home state of Illinois, winning a greater margin than she got in New York. And before the first polls had even closed, his aides were reminding anyone who would listen that they had never expected to carry more states than Clinton. Still, he only got just over half of the Latino vote in Illinois - and lost it by a margin of 2 to 1 in California, suggesting...
...dying from smoking, not wearing seatbelts or sunscreen, eating preservatives or biking without a helmet is relatively low. Our parents' generation, after all, (mostly) survived the clutches of these and many other perils. But while we generally heed the warnings about cigarettes, seatbelts and sunscreen, we go on having CT scans without putting up the slightest fuss. CT is a controllable risk. Doctors can practice medicine very well, most of the time, without CT scans. We need to avoid them when...
...question is, can truly rational decisions be made regarding their use? The statistics are hard to calculate. It would take all the computers at the Mayo clinic to compare the real risk to your life of doing a CT scan in a given situation with that of not doing one. And if the doctor can't compute that risk, there's no real way that a second-guessing patient can. But you can, and should, be more than a little reticent to have a CT scan unless it's absolutely needed...
...CT is absolutely necessary with head trauma and acute abdominal conditions. Minutes can make a difference in these cases - if, say, there's bleeding around your brain and you can't get an MRI - and the speed of a CT scan makes it worth the risk. But in most other situations, it's wise to let the doctor convince you it's worth it, before consenting to the scan. Ask your doctor what decisions he or she plans to make with the information from the scan. What other tests could yield the same information? Would an MRI be better...
...reality is that in some cases, you'll need a CT scan. If so, just remember that for you to be there, breathing, you've already beaten the odds of sickness and death any number of times. And you'll probably beat the CT-cancer odds too. If the doctor's answer to your questions, however, is something like "Well, why not do a CT scan?" or "A CT scan would show it too" or "A CT scan would rule out something rare" my response would be "Why not skip the scan?" One in fifty cancers is a hard number...