What is the difference between the types of radiation that cause cancer and the types of radiation used to treat cancer?
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* Radiation is just a mechanism of transferring energy through a medium. Your heater radiates heat. Your TV radiates visible light. Uranium radiates alpha particles. That’s all radiation.
* Ionising radiation describes the types of radiation that can damage biological structures like cells or DNA.
* Cancer is a group of diseases caused by faulty DNA. Faulty in just the right way that it causes the cell to stop functioning properly and replicate uncontrollably. Ionising radiation is one possible cause for that, but there are other causes.
* Radiation therapy is the use of ionising radiation to kill cancer cells, with specific targeting and dosage to avoid damaging surrounding healthy cells.
* It’s possible that the same type of radiation that caused the cancer could be used to treat it, but that would purely be a coincidence. The fact that there are different causes of cancer, and different methods of treatment, make it fairly unlikely from a mathematical standpoint.
* Also it’s rarely as simple as getting cancer from one specific source or event. Usually it’s a combination of multiple risk factors over many years, and using statistical probability to infer the primary cause. eg. we know that statistically, smoking increases the chance of lung cancer, but it’s impossible to look at a specific case of lung cancer and definitively prove it was caused by smoking and nothing else. That’s how cigarette companies got away with it for so long.
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