If doctors have to shield themselves from the X-ray machine at hospitals after doing it once or twice a day, how do people sit in front of a constant X-ray when working for the airport?
In: 5
Unless you have certain underlying medical issues, occasional exposure is fine.
If you’re taking an international you’re being exposed to more radiation, anyway.
Doctors and nurses go behind a shield because it would be constant radiation over many years. This can and does cause health issues, not limited to cancer, but cancer is a big one
The machine in the airport only scans things inside it, it doesn’t leak X-rays outside. In hospital the entire room with the patient is the machine. The reason for this is that it’s not possible to remove a part of a human body, put it in the scanner and then put it back on the body. And full body X-rays would be excessive and unnecessarily dangerous. So they only shoot X-rays through the specific body part in interest while the patient is in the room.
If you are talking about the full body scanners that you stand in and raise your hands, those are not Xray. Only the things that scan bags are xray and they have shielding tunnels.
Xray don’t penetrate metal all that well.
In the hospital, they are shining an x-ray into you in an open space, not exactly contained, so medical workers need to shield themselves.
But at the airport, the xray is surrounded in a metallic box, effectively surrounded by shielding.
BTW, doctors almost never use X-ray machines themselves, except some Cardiologists and Radiologists. It’s almost always Radiologic Technologists doing the imaging.
The answer is that not all x-rays are created equal, and, not all RAYS are created equal. They have energies that vary widely. Microwaves, visible light, radio waves, UVA and UVB waves, x-rays, Gamma rays, etc. are all parts of the “electromagnetic spectrum” AND different types of these rays interact with matter differently. For instance, you can focus light through a magnifying glass, but not X-rays.
The issue here is that the airport scanners DO use a form of “radiation”, but, not knowing how else to describe them, people say, “sort of like X-rays”.
The scanners scanning the bags on trays use X-rays, and have protective shields. The body use a very specific energy of 30-300 GHz, capable of penetrating just a TINY thickness of matter before almost all essentially bounce off, though a few are absorbed on the very surface of the skin (just like heat and light can be) where the skin cells are already dead and can’t be harmed. The imager counts on the ability of these mm-waves to get through most clothing, but then bounce off.
The one thing that is a good idea is closing your eyes, because the mm-waves won’t penetrate your eyelids, but the very surface of your open eyeball is less protected.
Latest Answers