Tumors And Radiation

[chiang mai]

I've spent the past couple of months trying to find out what is causing my painful neck problems, finally, after many visits to the ENT and Orthopaedic departments of various hospitals I finally found out that I have a problem with my thyroid. Several test and biopsies later I find that I have a series of tumors on my thyroid gland and one of these is pressing against the neck muscle hence the stiff and sometimes painful neck. It's no big deal thankfully because the tumors, despite being quite large are benign, but they need to be watched and re-examined every six months, phew! Heads up though, some 60% of sixty year olds have such tumors, albeit their type and origin may differ.

But the interesting part of all of this is that my tumors are of the follicular type and these are primarily caused by radiation, where in the world did that come from I asked myself and the subject made me think. Like many others I've had chest and dental x-rays on a regular basis and I've even had a CT scan, but surely not enough that cumulatively I might meet or exceed a lifetime dose maximum. Perhaps living close to the equator involves higher risk from radiation, albeit I'm not exactly a sun worshipper – maybe many years of working with computers or flying hundreds of thousands of miles around the world on business has something to do with it – who knows, perhaps radiologists in Thailand use a two tier system, one dosage for smaller locals and the turn it up high setting for the larger farang, but I'm being humorous on this point of course!

One of the disadvantages of living in an environment where we coordinate our own medical treatments, often at different clinics and hospitals, is that no one person has a single record of every treatment, if we had a GP then he would be the focal point for such things, as things stand I suppose it's down to us as individuals to track such things but I suspect of course that most of us don't.