I’ve gotten heart scans twice to monitor coronary artery calcification and get an Agatson score. I wonder how risky this is? I feel like the last time I did it the technician said that the amount of energy they have to use now is much less due to advances in CT scanning machines.

I guess a heart scan is about like six months of natural background radiation according to this chart.

https://www.radiologyinfo.org/en/info/safety-xray

My father’s side has a history of heart attacks, so I’m trying to avoid that fate and consider the risks worth it.

To maybe oversimplify it, cancer risk from radiation is all a stats game. The situations where you get a CT scan is either very rare (once or twice in a lifetime and often highly localized) or for a very acute issue (eg a heart attack or car accident) that is almost certainly worth the risks.

Also, ionizing radiation has a varying risks to different tissues. "Soft" tissues that have cells that divide a lot (lungs, colon, etc) are of greater risk than others. I wouldn't bat much of an eye for a CT scan on my knee, but would be more worried about a chest procedure. Again, more worried doesn't mean I wouldn't do it, as the alternative is either a much more expensive MRI, much more fuzzy echo-cardiogram, or wondering if my health is more seriously at risk.

Radiation is poorly understood in healthcare due to the LNT Model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model.

The science is based on assumptions and extrapolation, they drew a linear plot line between rates of cancers at different levels of radiation, and then extended it down and to the left. But there is no actual experimental data showing a relationship between low dose radiation and cancer (Ironically there IS evidence that rates of overall cancers are lower in high altitude cities like Denver with more background radiation).

I’ve remodulated my phaser arrays and randomized the stochastic spectral frequencies ten times, but those Borg keep adapting!!1