This might be one of those cures that works like the old T-Gel shampoo (ie: carcinogenic coal tar that turned out to be immune-suppressing enough to prevent dandruff eventually caused cancer).
Though, at the ages when Osteoarthritis shows up, it might be better to take on a smaller risk of monitor-able extremity cancer than the pretty large QoL reduction of severe arthritis.
Coal tar is technically carcinogenic, yes, but no study has found any association with cancer when used topically in low doses [1].
Coal tar's mechanism of action is thought to be carbazole, an aryl hydrocarbon. It is assumed to work through binding to the aryl hydrocarbon receptor, a relatively newly discovered immune cell regulator. Tapinarof (Vtama) is a new medication that also works on ArH and is really effective at
reducing inflammation.
Coal tar was also used together with UVA light and psoralen (a light-sensitizing medication) to treat skin diseases like psoriasis, a protocol called Goeckerman therapy that's no longer commonly practiced. This combination does carry the risk of cancer, but it's probably due to the UVA and not the coal tar.
There is a theory (theory! very theoretical) that the risk from radiation does not scale linearly and that low doses of radiation might actually be protective. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis
There is absolutely no reason to think that radiation damage should be linear. In fact, we can objectively say that isn’t the case because we KNOW about damage correcting pathways. The linear model, used for public safety limits, is picked as a conservative method because we don’t have a better model (and collecting data to make a better model would be unethical).
The “small dose radiation is actually beneficial” part is pure conjecture, and almost certainly wrong. But unrelated to the issue of the validity of the linear model.
There is the alternative observation that sometimes the effect of harmful things is based on the frequency and length of exposure, not so much its magnitude.
Compare with the CTE, where a few bone-crushing traumas do not seem to cause it, but chronic long-term low grade impacts is more likely to cause it.
Another example, I probably could eat a massive amount of processed meat a few times without much ill effect, but years of eating moderate amounts might do you in.
It's probably reasonable to say that radiation actually being beneficial is very theoretical, but the linear no-threshold model of harm from radiation is definitely in the theoretical category too. It's used because it's very conservative, but evidence supporting it for low radiation dosages is very weak.
Ra-di-a-tion. Yes, indeed. You hear the most outrageous lies about it. Half-baked goggle-box do-gooders telling everybody it's bad for you. Pernicious nonsense. Everybody could stand a hundred chest X-rays a year. They ought to have them, too.
On the other hand, the radon health cave industry is overjoyed and vindicated. And people with radon in their basement can start hosting "wellness sessions".
radon radiation is primarily alpha. That is never good in any dose.
>In this multicenter trial, researchers enrolled 114 patients with moderate-to-mild knee osteoarthritis across three academic centers in Korea. Participants were randomly assigned to receive one of two radiation regimens — a very low dose (0.3 Gy) or a low dose (3 Gy)
This is gamma. Those doses are "low" because delivery here is localized. If given full-body the 3Gy has something like 25-50% mortality.
The cancer patient are delivered like 20-80Gy into the tumor and surrounding tissues which just kills cells outright.
It's not really the radiation from radon itself which is the problem, but rather radon's daughters. Radon is a noble gas, so it's not going to accumulate in you and doesn't get much chance to do damage to people even if they inhale it; they'll just exhale it moments later before barely any of it can decay. But radon's daughters, the chain of atoms which are produced from the decay of radon and each other, aren't gases, so if stagnant air with radon sticks around it's going to 'rain' an atomic dust of radioactive isotopes which can accumulate and, if disturbed, can be inhaled and stick with people.
The age-related risk is an excellent comment. There are illnesses that progress slowly, and the age should always be taken into account when going for a cure.
I am in my 50s and wonder from time to time what I would do if certain health-related events strike. For some, I have a well-defined solution (such as suicide for Alzheimer or ALS; or an active cure for cancers that have a fair chance of being fought). The more problematic ones are the ones fatal in long(er) term, with an aggressive and diminishing cure.
Wow! I've actually used T-Gel because I used to get dandruff really bad as a teen and it was pretty effective. It's horrifying to know what it really was.
I used it briefly and then researched it and it seemed like at the time (mid-2000s), nobody could say which of the menagerie of components of the coal tar was actually the effective one.
For centuries, in Bulgaria, since Roman times, people have been bathing in slightly radioactive water to treat osteoarthritis. I'm not sure how this is news or an invention when it's been around for centuries and has been the standard of care in Bulgaria for decades. There are sanatoriums and spa centers in Pavel Banya, Bulgaria [0], and I know many friends who go there once or twice a year for treatments and swear they couldn't live without them!
Just because something has been done for hundreds of years does not mean it has been scientifically shown to actually do more than placebo.
A lot of people do a lot of stuff that has been proven to do nothing detectable, and they still swear by it.
"It has been done for hundreds of years" isn't a good argument. There is a reason "Appeal to tradition" is one of the more famous logical fallacies.
Also: The radiation doses used in this trial are very likely much, much higher than what you would get from such a bath in radioactive water (otherwise the water would be so radioactive that staying in there or even drinking it would kill you very quickly), so this doesn't really tell us anything about whether the traditional modalities do anything or not. And yes, stuff like that also exists in Austria with Radon caves, and many other places.
Modern medicine is hardly logical where therapies are concerned. There is often not any coherent theory of why a therapy works and yet it may be commonly used in treatments. If you examine the literature supplied with your drugs, it often states "exact mechanism of action is unknown but yada yada". This is why there are double blind studies in medicine. Absent a theory, this is the only way to gauge the effectiveness of a therapy. Hence, if bathing in slightly radioactive waters has provided beneficial to people over a long period of time, you can't dismiss it as "appealing to tradition". It may need validation with a study but can't be ignored as just tradition.
The fact that it's been done over a long period of time does not prove that it's beneficial. As you say, that's why there are double-blind studies. If the only evidence of benefit is that it's been done for a long time, that literally is just tradition. It's worth looking into it to see if it works, but there are plenty of traditional remedies with long histories that don't.
Science is a process, and from what you described above it is working.
Everyone in science knows that all knowledge is provisional, and that goes 100-fold for things which haven't been replicated. Science is an algorithm for ratcheting understanding despite the fact that humans are fallible and some humans are outright frauds.
When we say "everyone in science", I think the part that people find scary is that it's hard to tell who is in science versus who is in 'science'.
Or in other words, it's hard to tell from the outside who really believes what you're stating and who believes it until it's inconvenient, or until it clashes with their personal ideology.
When what you're referring to is "science" in quotes, you seem to already have admitted what these people are appealing to is "science" in name only.
People acting in bad faith will appeal to whatever authority they think will achieve their goals. It says nothing of the legitimacy of Science, and if you let the actions of bad actors take actual Science off the table, you've only empowered bad actors to make things far worse for yourself.
There are also old radon baths in Jachymov in Czech republic working on same principle. Exactly for same primary purpose - problems with joints and bones.
Then communists made local uranium mines/gulags for 'enemies of the state' which was basically a prolonged death sentence, many were just beaten to death or died from cold/starvation.
Glad to see this! We need better treatments for OA short of a joint replacement.
I'm not too surprised that this treatment works. It's essentially like localized steroids to just the joint- killing off the immune cells causing inflammation.
Good features is that it's localized (so no systemic immunosuppression) and the risk of cancer is low since you rarely get radiation-induced cancer in joints because there's not enough dividing cells. Unfortunately heading to radiotherapy is a logistical challenge, but there are enough people suffering from OA that would happily do this to get relief.
> It's essentially like localized steroids to just the joint- killing off the immune cells causing inflammation.
Are you confusing osteoarthritis with rheumatoid arthritis? I didn't think the pain of osteoarthritis had anything to do with the immune response. You've literally got bone rubbing against bone. It's not going to feel good.
Both OA and RA involve some inflammation (-itis means inflammation). RA is more T cell driven inflammation (and clinically visible) while OA is more macrophage driven. Mechanical wearing still makes the joint unhappy at the cellular level- you just don’t see it big and red as a symptom like in RA.
UV doses sufficient to cause erythema, mild sunburn, will trigger programmed apoptosis(programmed cell death) and if you don't have some other sensitivity to UV and do have psoriasis (another chronic autoimmune disease) after the sunburn has subsided you can get substantial reduction in the size and severity of skin lesions in many cases. The reset can sometimes last for awhile. This is well known and is the basis for natural (sun) and medically administered (uvb light) treatments.
In no way is UV caused DNA damage good for a person in any dose. The effectiveness of this treatment has nothing to do with vitamin D generation or hormonal changes as far as I know. You have to damage your skin to somehow reset the immune system and get the result. It is a bargain with the devil as I think are many radiation based therapies. That doesn't mean they aren't useful.
3 Gy is nowhere near what could be qualified as a "Low dose".
"A whole-body acute exposure to 5 grays or more of high-energy radiation usually leads to death within 14 days. LD1 is 2.5 Gy, LD50 is 5 Gy and LD99 is 8 Gy.[11] The LD50 dose represents 375 joules for a 75 kg adult. " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_(unit)#Radiation_poisonin...
Gray (Gy) - measures energy deposited per kilogram of tissue. Think of it like measuring how many bullets hit a target, not how much damage they do.
Sievert (Sv) - measures biological damage. This accounts for the fact that different types of radiation and different tissues react differently. Think of this as the actual damage done.
The bullet's energy is identical in all cases (same Gy), but the biological damage varies wildly (different Sv).
The same energy deposited (Gy) causes vastly different biological damage (Sv) depending on:
What tissue (bone marrow is like your heart - critical; muscle is more resilient)
What radiation type (alpha particles are like hollow-point bullets - more damaging per energy unit; gamma rays are like full metal jacket - cleaner pass-through)
For most medical purposes (X-rays, gamma rays), 1 Gy is approx 1 Sv, which is why people use them interchangeably and add to confusion.
Location and delivery matter enormously. It's like pouring water. Put 3 liters in your lungs, you drown (dead). Put 3 liters on your hand, your hand gets wet (annoying but harmless).
3 Gy to your whole body at once is potentially fatal. You'll likely die within weeks from bone marrow failure, your blood cells can't regenerate. 3 Gy to a small tumor in your knee is a typical treatment session. The rest of your body gets almost nothing, and your bone marrow keeps working fine. 3 Gy spread over 6 sessions (0.5 Gy each) to a localized area is a very low dose that gives tissue time to repair.
A gray is a measure of energy deposition per unit mass. 1 Gy to the entire body is very different than 1 Gy to a particular part of the body, especially since some parts of the body are far more sensitive to radiation than others.
Two key caveats: 40% of people said their arthritis got better with the placebo treatment, while 70% got better with the radiation. Yes, that's clearly a difference, but it also means that 40% of people don't need to expose themselves to the side effects of radiation in order to get relief from their arthritis. Second, the realy number of people who don't need radiation is actually higher, because this study limited the use of NSAIDs like ibuprofen (Advil) or naproxen, which would probably have helped a lot of the other people. Granted, for people who can't take NSAIDs because of kidney disease or something, maybe this will be an option in the future, but I really want to see the long-term safety data before I go irradiating everyone's knees.
A recent Peter Attia Drive podcast has an interview with Dr. Sanjay Mehta, a radiation oncologist who has recently also started using low-dose radiation to treat arthritis. Empirically the results seem quite encouraging.
Depending on the field, 3 Gy IS 'small' (with respect to doses to tissue during cancer treatment, which can be 60 Gy). Whole body doses of 1 milliGy in the environmental biz are considered worth examination. Even investigations of biomarkers for radiation exposure typically use doses in the range of 3 Gy.
Interesting. Now I have a question about that video, and I think I'm more likely to get a good answer from someone here than in the comments there, so here goes:
Tom says that because that's the only radon cave that can turn the flow of radon on and off at will, it's the only place where you could (in theory) run a double-blind experiment on radon exposure therapy.
My question is: would it not be just as possible to do that in a laboratory setting? Surely there are already lab facilities in the world that are set up for double blind "exposure" experiments of that sort, with easy control of dosages, flow rates, etc. Is the problem that radon gas too expensive to harvest or store safely? Why is that cave the only feasible option?
EDIT: It now occurs to me that the answer could be "because the half life of radon is to short to transport it, so you would basically have to generate it in the lab by getting an enormous amount of uranium in one place and letting it decay and find some way of filtering the byproducts to isolate the radon in a way that putting it under a huge layer of bedrock does naturally." Sounds plausible to me, but does anyone know if that's the case?
This should be a reminder that we have no evidence that the Linear no threshold model of radiation exposure is accurate. In fact, we have compelling evidence against it. But due to rather aggressive lobbying effort by anti-nuclear activists, we are stuck with this idea for the time being.
It's simply the default that was decided on as the most conservative option possible, but that's pretty much it.
Radioactive baths have a rather long pedigree. In Jachymov, Czech Republic, they are used for over century. Sometimes they are even covered by health insurance.
Some anti-nuclear activists are against LNT because they think it understates the effect of low dose radiation.
The conservative approach would be to assume low dose radiation has the maximum effect not ruled out by evidence. This would be higher than predicted by LNT.
I'd much more prefer allogeneic stem cell treatment for osteoarthitis. It's a shame it's not available in all those countries where millions of dollars are made by companies making knee joint replacement prosthesis. What a coincidence.
The Cayman Islands is one I can think of and I wouldn't trust any of those American studies where most doctors usually have several conflicts of interest in this case with manufacturers of prosthetics.
"Phase III for Clinical Efficacy Trial – beginning in 2025
Our product MAG200 has successfully completed Phase I/II of a clinical trials on the use of allogeneic (donor) off-the-shelf stem cell therapy for OA. The pivotal Phase III trial is planned to commence in 2025."
Exposure to radiation up-regulates
genes involved in DNA repair pathways,
genes associated with antioxidant
defense (notably those downstream of the Nrf2
transcription factor) and autophagy-related genes (which are crucial for the degradation and
recycling of cellular components).
Fasting does all those things, too -- without introducing random errors into one's DNA. Basically everyone under 40 should do regular fasts of some form, and those that do will probably derive no additional benefit from exposure to ionizing radiation, i.e., the type of radiation being promoted by the OP. (People older than 40 need to worry about losing muscle mass during a fast since old people find it very hard regain muscle mass once it it lost. Actually it is likely that only people over 60 or 65 might have to worry about muscle mass: experts disagree on the best cut-off age, and 40 years old's is the lowest I have seen.)
Three days of fasting has all of the benefits I list above, but there are risks to going completely without calories for that long, and actually our ancestors probably went without any access to calories for days almost never, but often endured stretches of days in which their calorie intake was less than a sustainable level, but not zero. To reduce the risks of going completely without calories for 3 days at a time, longevity researchers have devised the "fasting-mimicking diet", which give over the course of 5 days most or all of the benefits as eating no calories at all for 3 days. It restricts calories to about 800 calories per day with only 10% of that coming from protein and is the type of fasting that most people should be doing.
FMD requires no interaction with or prescription from the health-care industry and costs nothing except the time and attention needed to learn how to count calories if one has never done that before.
> Basically everyone under 40 should do regular fasts of some form,
I'm extremely sceptical of claims of the form "basically everyone in [broad group] should do [medical intervention]", but you sound knowledgeable. Could you share your evidence, please?
Part of my evidence is how much better I felt when I started doing these 5-day FMD "dives". A chronic condition (chronic pain in one of my femurs) which I had consulted a doctor about without avail and which had plagued me for decades completely cleared up, making my experience of life significantly more pleasant. (The most likely cause of the chronic condition is damage to the "growth plate" in this bone through too much usage of it when I was a child.) There were other positive changes if my subjective experience of life is any indication (and according to my immunologist, it is a good indication—at least of immune-system function).
Our ancestors were required to do hours per day of physical exertion just to stay alive. Because of technological progress, it is possible for most people these days to survive with very little exertion, but we now know that living this way (doing very little exertion) is bad for a person with the result that most of us should regularly exercise to maintain our health. Similarly our ancestors were required to endure periods of "calorie deficit" (eating fewer calories than would be survivable if the deficit went on indefinitely). The body uses these periods to disassemble damaged proteins inside cells (autophagy) and to get rid of unnecessary and damaged cells (apoptosis). When a person never undergoes a calorie deficit, these processes do not happen or happen to a much lesser degree than is optimal.
IIUC the main experimental evidence for the benefits of FMD come from an earlier protocol called "calorie restriction" in which the number of calories is kept constant and is a little lower (25% or 30% IIRC) than the individual would prefer to eat or that most Westerners actually eat. This protocol was found to extend life in mice significantly. Then someone found that fasting can improve the same biomarkers that calorie restriction improves (and consequently can be expected to have the same beneficial effects on longevity). But fasting by eating zero calories for days has adverse effects (including sudden death), starting a search for a diet that has the same beneficial effects on the biomarkers without the adverse effects of zero-calorie fasting.
Valter Longo is the longevity research who devised the FMD.
I am _not_ an expert or a professional in this field.
You're referencing literature obliquely, but that's not enough for me to look it up. It'd be helpful to future readers (some of whom will be 10 or 15 years in the future) if you could track down those references, cite them, and explain what information is in those references, and what is your own anecdotal evidence.
The only anecdotal evidence is in the first para. The second para is an obvious evolutionary argument, which I came up with myself rather than my hearing it from somewhere else (but it follows the same simple pattern as many evolutionary arguments I have heard). The rest is my recollection of what I learned listening to Longo's being interviewed and maybe also what I learned from a few quick uses of a search engine.
I decline your suggestion for me to look stuff up so that I can post the results here. I might have made the effort if my previous 2 comments had been upvoted significantly (which is the main way for me to tell whether readers value them) but both are sitting at a score of 1.
This might be one of those cures that works like the old T-Gel shampoo (ie: carcinogenic coal tar that turned out to be immune-suppressing enough to prevent dandruff eventually caused cancer).
Though, at the ages when Osteoarthritis shows up, it might be better to take on a smaller risk of monitor-able extremity cancer than the pretty large QoL reduction of severe arthritis.
That's not why coal tar works.
Coal tar is technically carcinogenic, yes, but no study has found any association with cancer when used topically in low doses [1].
Coal tar's mechanism of action is thought to be carbazole, an aryl hydrocarbon. It is assumed to work through binding to the aryl hydrocarbon receptor, a relatively newly discovered immune cell regulator. Tapinarof (Vtama) is a new medication that also works on ArH and is really effective at reducing inflammation.
Coal tar was also used together with UVA light and psoralen (a light-sensitizing medication) to treat skin diseases like psoriasis, a protocol called Goeckerman therapy that's no longer commonly practiced. This combination does carry the risk of cancer, but it's probably due to the UVA and not the coal tar.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022202X1...
There is a theory (theory! very theoretical) that the risk from radiation does not scale linearly and that low doses of radiation might actually be protective. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis
There is absolutely no reason to think that radiation damage should be linear. In fact, we can objectively say that isn’t the case because we KNOW about damage correcting pathways. The linear model, used for public safety limits, is picked as a conservative method because we don’t have a better model (and collecting data to make a better model would be unethical).
The “small dose radiation is actually beneficial” part is pure conjecture, and almost certainly wrong. But unrelated to the issue of the validity of the linear model.
There is the alternative observation that sometimes the effect of harmful things is based on the frequency and length of exposure, not so much its magnitude.
Compare with the CTE, where a few bone-crushing traumas do not seem to cause it, but chronic long-term low grade impacts is more likely to cause it.
Another example, I probably could eat a massive amount of processed meat a few times without much ill effect, but years of eating moderate amounts might do you in.
I bet there's overlap there with conditions that aren't directly caused by external damage... but by the body's dysregulated reaction to it.
It's probably reasonable to say that radiation actually being beneficial is very theoretical, but the linear no-threshold model of harm from radiation is definitely in the theoretical category too. It's used because it's very conservative, but evidence supporting it for low radiation dosages is very weak.
Like sunlight on skin?
So we are going full circle now?
Radiation is good for you now, a little bit, as a treat.
Ra-di-a-tion. Yes, indeed. You hear the most outrageous lies about it. Half-baked goggle-box do-gooders telling everybody it's bad for you. Pernicious nonsense. Everybody could stand a hundred chest X-rays a year. They ought to have them, too.
J. Frank Parnell (from the movie Repo Man).
Perhaps the word you are looking for is "conjecture that the risk from radiation ..." ??
The residential radon mitigation industry does not like this.
On the other hand, the radon health cave industry is overjoyed and vindicated. And people with radon in their basement can start hosting "wellness sessions".
radon radiation is primarily alpha. That is never good in any dose.
>In this multicenter trial, researchers enrolled 114 patients with moderate-to-mild knee osteoarthritis across three academic centers in Korea. Participants were randomly assigned to receive one of two radiation regimens — a very low dose (0.3 Gy) or a low dose (3 Gy)
This is gamma. Those doses are "low" because delivery here is localized. If given full-body the 3Gy has something like 25-50% mortality.
The cancer patient are delivered like 20-80Gy into the tumor and surrounding tissues which just kills cells outright.
The point is that "radiation" is multiparametric.
It's not really the radiation from radon itself which is the problem, but rather radon's daughters. Radon is a noble gas, so it's not going to accumulate in you and doesn't get much chance to do damage to people even if they inhale it; they'll just exhale it moments later before barely any of it can decay. But radon's daughters, the chain of atoms which are produced from the decay of radon and each other, aren't gases, so if stagnant air with radon sticks around it's going to 'rain' an atomic dust of radioactive isotopes which can accumulate and, if disturbed, can be inhaled and stick with people.
The age-related risk is an excellent comment. There are illnesses that progress slowly, and the age should always be taken into account when going for a cure.
I am in my 50s and wonder from time to time what I would do if certain health-related events strike. For some, I have a well-defined solution (such as suicide for Alzheimer or ALS; or an active cure for cancers that have a fair chance of being fought). The more problematic ones are the ones fatal in long(er) term, with an aggressive and diminishing cure.
Wow! I've actually used T-Gel because I used to get dandruff really bad as a teen and it was pretty effective. It's horrifying to know what it really was.
It says coal tar right on the bottle. And it smells awful. And it can be pretty effective.
I used it briefly and then researched it and it seemed like at the time (mid-2000s), nobody could say which of the menagerie of components of the coal tar was actually the effective one.
I stopped pretty much at that point.
It's not true, fortunately. See my reply to the grandparent.
Try using something mild like baby shampoo, use tiny amounts of it, and less frequently. Works a lot better in my experience.
For centuries, in Bulgaria, since Roman times, people have been bathing in slightly radioactive water to treat osteoarthritis. I'm not sure how this is news or an invention when it's been around for centuries and has been the standard of care in Bulgaria for decades. There are sanatoriums and spa centers in Pavel Banya, Bulgaria [0], and I know many friends who go there once or twice a year for treatments and swear they couldn't live without them!
[0]: https://pavelbanyagrand.com/en/the-healing-mineral-water-in-...
Just because something has been done for hundreds of years does not mean it has been scientifically shown to actually do more than placebo. A lot of people do a lot of stuff that has been proven to do nothing detectable, and they still swear by it.
"It has been done for hundreds of years" isn't a good argument. There is a reason "Appeal to tradition" is one of the more famous logical fallacies.
Also: The radiation doses used in this trial are very likely much, much higher than what you would get from such a bath in radioactive water (otherwise the water would be so radioactive that staying in there or even drinking it would kill you very quickly), so this doesn't really tell us anything about whether the traditional modalities do anything or not. And yes, stuff like that also exists in Austria with Radon caves, and many other places.
Modern medicine is hardly logical where therapies are concerned. There is often not any coherent theory of why a therapy works and yet it may be commonly used in treatments. If you examine the literature supplied with your drugs, it often states "exact mechanism of action is unknown but yada yada". This is why there are double blind studies in medicine. Absent a theory, this is the only way to gauge the effectiveness of a therapy. Hence, if bathing in slightly radioactive waters has provided beneficial to people over a long period of time, you can't dismiss it as "appealing to tradition". It may need validation with a study but can't be ignored as just tradition.
The fact that it's been done over a long period of time does not prove that it's beneficial. As you say, that's why there are double-blind studies. If the only evidence of benefit is that it's been done for a long time, that literally is just tradition. It's worth looking into it to see if it works, but there are plenty of traditional remedies with long histories that don't.
Good point! Interestingly there is evidence that at least some life forms appear to benefit from 'highly radioactive' water.
https://hal.science/hal-03025146v1/file/Petit%20et%20al%2020...
"Direct Meta-Analyses Reveal Unexpected Microbial Life in the Highly Radioactive Water of an Operating Nuclear Reactor Core"
https://journals.asm.org/doi/pdf/10.1128/spectrum.01995-22
"Culturomics of Bacteria from Radon-Saturated Water of the World’s Oldest Radium Mine"
[flagged]
Science is a process, and from what you described above it is working.
Everyone in science knows that all knowledge is provisional, and that goes 100-fold for things which haven't been replicated. Science is an algorithm for ratcheting understanding despite the fact that humans are fallible and some humans are outright frauds.
When we say "everyone in science", I think the part that people find scary is that it's hard to tell who is in science versus who is in 'science'.
Or in other words, it's hard to tell from the outside who really believes what you're stating and who believes it until it's inconvenient, or until it clashes with their personal ideology.
When what you're referring to is "science" in quotes, you seem to already have admitted what these people are appealing to is "science" in name only.
People acting in bad faith will appeal to whatever authority they think will achieve their goals. It says nothing of the legitimacy of Science, and if you let the actions of bad actors take actual Science off the table, you've only empowered bad actors to make things far worse for yourself.
There are also old radon baths in Jachymov in Czech republic working on same principle. Exactly for same primary purpose - problems with joints and bones.
Then communists made local uranium mines/gulags for 'enemies of the state' which was basically a prolonged death sentence, many were just beaten to death or died from cold/starvation.
I'm not clear on what the second paragraph is adding to your example in the first.
It's a related and important historical fact that is not well known outside of Czechia. Why not share it with wider audience when given a chance.
Off topic: I just learned a couple weeks ago that Czechia and Czech Republic are both acceptable names for the country.
Similar treatments exist without the radioactive water.
I heard some Amish talking about their parents taking a trip to Montana to visit the radon mines for arthritis.
An example here: https://www.radonmine.com/facility/
There's quite a few out that way.
> The mineral water in Pavel Banya is rich in the chemical element radon
> The mineral takes care of having radiant and beautiful skin, healthy bones and, of course, excellent brain functions.
Ah, yes, radiant skin.
[dead]
Glad to see this! We need better treatments for OA short of a joint replacement.
I'm not too surprised that this treatment works. It's essentially like localized steroids to just the joint- killing off the immune cells causing inflammation.
Good features is that it's localized (so no systemic immunosuppression) and the risk of cancer is low since you rarely get radiation-induced cancer in joints because there's not enough dividing cells. Unfortunately heading to radiotherapy is a logistical challenge, but there are enough people suffering from OA that would happily do this to get relief.
> It's essentially like localized steroids to just the joint- killing off the immune cells causing inflammation.
Are you confusing osteoarthritis with rheumatoid arthritis? I didn't think the pain of osteoarthritis had anything to do with the immune response. You've literally got bone rubbing against bone. It's not going to feel good.
Both OA and RA involve some inflammation (-itis means inflammation). RA is more T cell driven inflammation (and clinically visible) while OA is more macrophage driven. Mechanical wearing still makes the joint unhappy at the cellular level- you just don’t see it big and red as a symptom like in RA.
UV doses sufficient to cause erythema, mild sunburn, will trigger programmed apoptosis(programmed cell death) and if you don't have some other sensitivity to UV and do have psoriasis (another chronic autoimmune disease) after the sunburn has subsided you can get substantial reduction in the size and severity of skin lesions in many cases. The reset can sometimes last for awhile. This is well known and is the basis for natural (sun) and medically administered (uvb light) treatments.
In no way is UV caused DNA damage good for a person in any dose. The effectiveness of this treatment has nothing to do with vitamin D generation or hormonal changes as far as I know. You have to damage your skin to somehow reset the immune system and get the result. It is a bargain with the devil as I think are many radiation based therapies. That doesn't mean they aren't useful.
3 Gy is nowhere near what could be qualified as a "Low dose".
"A whole-body acute exposure to 5 grays or more of high-energy radiation usually leads to death within 14 days. LD1 is 2.5 Gy, LD50 is 5 Gy and LD99 is 8 Gy.[11] The LD50 dose represents 375 joules for a 75 kg adult. " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_(unit)#Radiation_poisonin...
Gray (Gy) - measures energy deposited per kilogram of tissue. Think of it like measuring how many bullets hit a target, not how much damage they do.
Sievert (Sv) - measures biological damage. This accounts for the fact that different types of radiation and different tissues react differently. Think of this as the actual damage done.
The bullet's energy is identical in all cases (same Gy), but the biological damage varies wildly (different Sv).
The same energy deposited (Gy) causes vastly different biological damage (Sv) depending on:
What tissue (bone marrow is like your heart - critical; muscle is more resilient)
What radiation type (alpha particles are like hollow-point bullets - more damaging per energy unit; gamma rays are like full metal jacket - cleaner pass-through)
For most medical purposes (X-rays, gamma rays), 1 Gy is approx 1 Sv, which is why people use them interchangeably and add to confusion.
Location and delivery matter enormously. It's like pouring water. Put 3 liters in your lungs, you drown (dead). Put 3 liters on your hand, your hand gets wet (annoying but harmless).
3 Gy to your whole body at once is potentially fatal. You'll likely die within weeks from bone marrow failure, your blood cells can't regenerate. 3 Gy to a small tumor in your knee is a typical treatment session. The rest of your body gets almost nothing, and your bone marrow keeps working fine. 3 Gy spread over 6 sessions (0.5 Gy each) to a localized area is a very low dose that gives tissue time to repair.
A gray is a measure of energy deposition per unit mass. 1 Gy to the entire body is very different than 1 Gy to a particular part of the body, especially since some parts of the body are far more sensitive to radiation than others.
The abstract indicates 6 fractions (so 0.5Gy for each). And 3 is low compared to cancer treatments, which go up to 80 Gy.
Gy has a mass component to it. Is 3Gy on just your joint different to 3Gy of your whole body?
For a moment I was confused that radiation doses would be measured in gigayears.
Two key caveats: 40% of people said their arthritis got better with the placebo treatment, while 70% got better with the radiation. Yes, that's clearly a difference, but it also means that 40% of people don't need to expose themselves to the side effects of radiation in order to get relief from their arthritis. Second, the realy number of people who don't need radiation is actually higher, because this study limited the use of NSAIDs like ibuprofen (Advil) or naproxen, which would probably have helped a lot of the other people. Granted, for people who can't take NSAIDs because of kidney disease or something, maybe this will be an option in the future, but I really want to see the long-term safety data before I go irradiating everyone's knees.
A recent Peter Attia Drive podcast has an interview with Dr. Sanjay Mehta, a radiation oncologist who has recently also started using low-dose radiation to treat arthritis. Empirically the results seem quite encouraging.
https://peterattiamd.com/sanjaymehta/
Depending on the field, 3 Gy IS 'small' (with respect to doses to tissue during cancer treatment, which can be 60 Gy). Whole body doses of 1 milliGy in the environmental biz are considered worth examination. Even investigations of biomarkers for radiation exposure typically use doses in the range of 3 Gy.
Tom Scott made a video about a related treatment - radon caves a couple years ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZkusjDFlS0
Interesting. Now I have a question about that video, and I think I'm more likely to get a good answer from someone here than in the comments there, so here goes:
Tom says that because that's the only radon cave that can turn the flow of radon on and off at will, it's the only place where you could (in theory) run a double-blind experiment on radon exposure therapy.
My question is: would it not be just as possible to do that in a laboratory setting? Surely there are already lab facilities in the world that are set up for double blind "exposure" experiments of that sort, with easy control of dosages, flow rates, etc. Is the problem that radon gas too expensive to harvest or store safely? Why is that cave the only feasible option?
EDIT: It now occurs to me that the answer could be "because the half life of radon is to short to transport it, so you would basically have to generate it in the lab by getting an enormous amount of uranium in one place and letting it decay and find some way of filtering the byproducts to isolate the radon in a way that putting it under a huge layer of bedrock does naturally." Sounds plausible to me, but does anyone know if that's the case?
I am offering my basement as a Radon spa. Anyone interested?
Dose can be controlled by switching off the forced ventilation and sealing the gas trap.
This should be a reminder that we have no evidence that the Linear no threshold model of radiation exposure is accurate. In fact, we have compelling evidence against it. But due to rather aggressive lobbying effort by anti-nuclear activists, we are stuck with this idea for the time being.
It's simply the default that was decided on as the most conservative option possible, but that's pretty much it.
Radioactive baths have a rather long pedigree. In Jachymov, Czech Republic, they are used for over century. Sometimes they are even covered by health insurance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A9%C4%8Debn%C3%A9_l%C3%A1...
I think the point of the article is that there hasn’t been a lot of evidence for low dose radiation as a treatment.
Some anti-nuclear activists are against LNT because they think it understates the effect of low dose radiation.
The conservative approach would be to assume low dose radiation has the maximum effect not ruled out by evidence. This would be higher than predicted by LNT.
Exactly, it could be that a few pretty high exposures are actually less damaging than frequent low but clinically significant exposures.
stuck in cloudflare for 3 seconds so i cancelled loading the website
why to web admins think this is acceptable for visitors?
I'd much more prefer allogeneic stem cell treatment for osteoarthitis. It's a shame it's not available in all those countries where millions of dollars are made by companies making knee joint replacement prosthesis. What a coincidence.
https://physicians.dukehealth.org/articles/stem-cell-therapy...
Which countries is it a available/approved in?
The Cayman Islands is one I can think of and I wouldn't trust any of those American studies where most doctors usually have several conflicts of interest in this case with manufacturers of prosthetics.
One Australian company conducting research: https://www.magellanstemcells.com.au/about/
"Phase III for Clinical Efficacy Trial – beginning in 2025
Our product MAG200 has successfully completed Phase I/II of a clinical trials on the use of allogeneic (donor) off-the-shelf stem cell therapy for OA. The pivotal Phase III trial is planned to commence in 2025."
Exposure to radiation up-regulates genes involved in DNA repair pathways, genes associated with antioxidant defense (notably those downstream of the Nrf2 transcription factor) and autophagy-related genes (which are crucial for the degradation and recycling of cellular components).
Fasting does all those things, too -- without introducing random errors into one's DNA. Basically everyone under 40 should do regular fasts of some form, and those that do will probably derive no additional benefit from exposure to ionizing radiation, i.e., the type of radiation being promoted by the OP. (People older than 40 need to worry about losing muscle mass during a fast since old people find it very hard regain muscle mass once it it lost. Actually it is likely that only people over 60 or 65 might have to worry about muscle mass: experts disagree on the best cut-off age, and 40 years old's is the lowest I have seen.)
Three days of fasting has all of the benefits I list above, but there are risks to going completely without calories for that long, and actually our ancestors probably went without any access to calories for days almost never, but often endured stretches of days in which their calorie intake was less than a sustainable level, but not zero. To reduce the risks of going completely without calories for 3 days at a time, longevity researchers have devised the "fasting-mimicking diet", which give over the course of 5 days most or all of the benefits as eating no calories at all for 3 days. It restricts calories to about 800 calories per day with only 10% of that coming from protein and is the type of fasting that most people should be doing.
FMD requires no interaction with or prescription from the health-care industry and costs nothing except the time and attention needed to learn how to count calories if one has never done that before.
> Basically everyone under 40 should do regular fasts of some form,
I'm extremely sceptical of claims of the form "basically everyone in [broad group] should do [medical intervention]", but you sound knowledgeable. Could you share your evidence, please?
Part of my evidence is how much better I felt when I started doing these 5-day FMD "dives". A chronic condition (chronic pain in one of my femurs) which I had consulted a doctor about without avail and which had plagued me for decades completely cleared up, making my experience of life significantly more pleasant. (The most likely cause of the chronic condition is damage to the "growth plate" in this bone through too much usage of it when I was a child.) There were other positive changes if my subjective experience of life is any indication (and according to my immunologist, it is a good indication—at least of immune-system function).
Our ancestors were required to do hours per day of physical exertion just to stay alive. Because of technological progress, it is possible for most people these days to survive with very little exertion, but we now know that living this way (doing very little exertion) is bad for a person with the result that most of us should regularly exercise to maintain our health. Similarly our ancestors were required to endure periods of "calorie deficit" (eating fewer calories than would be survivable if the deficit went on indefinitely). The body uses these periods to disassemble damaged proteins inside cells (autophagy) and to get rid of unnecessary and damaged cells (apoptosis). When a person never undergoes a calorie deficit, these processes do not happen or happen to a much lesser degree than is optimal.
IIUC the main experimental evidence for the benefits of FMD come from an earlier protocol called "calorie restriction" in which the number of calories is kept constant and is a little lower (25% or 30% IIRC) than the individual would prefer to eat or that most Westerners actually eat. This protocol was found to extend life in mice significantly. Then someone found that fasting can improve the same biomarkers that calorie restriction improves (and consequently can be expected to have the same beneficial effects on longevity). But fasting by eating zero calories for days has adverse effects (including sudden death), starting a search for a diet that has the same beneficial effects on the biomarkers without the adverse effects of zero-calorie fasting.
Valter Longo is the longevity research who devised the FMD.
I am _not_ an expert or a professional in this field.
You're referencing literature obliquely, but that's not enough for me to look it up. It'd be helpful to future readers (some of whom will be 10 or 15 years in the future) if you could track down those references, cite them, and explain what information is in those references, and what is your own anecdotal evidence.
The only anecdotal evidence is in the first para. The second para is an obvious evolutionary argument, which I came up with myself rather than my hearing it from somewhere else (but it follows the same simple pattern as many evolutionary arguments I have heard). The rest is my recollection of what I learned listening to Longo's being interviewed and maybe also what I learned from a few quick uses of a search engine.
I decline your suggestion for me to look stuff up so that I can post the results here. I might have made the effort if my previous 2 comments had been upvoted significantly (which is the main way for me to tell whether readers value them) but both are sitting at a score of 1.
How soon will some entrepreneur open a spa in Chernobyl?
Way ahead of you https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZkusjDFlS0
> Low-dose radiation offers relief to people with knee osteoarthritis
Radon girls anyone ? /s