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In this vein does anyone know if there are treatments for radiation poisoning that aren't purely palliative?

tehbeard 10y ago
I do recall a few years back a drug being refereed to as real life version of Rad Away from the Fallout game series. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex-Rad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex-Rad
- centizen 10y ago
  From the sounds of it, it's more like Rad-X from the same games. (Rad-X increases your radiation resistance, RadAway removes radiation poisoning)
  - gohrt 10y ago
    I wonder how the game and its impact would be different if they refused to make RadAway part of the game.
centizen 10y ago
Unfortunately, radiation poisoning is an often irreversible process - it involves the destruction of cells, muscle and tissue at a molecular level in a way that our bodies never were designed to be recover from. Majority of medical practices in this space focus on removing ingested or inhaled radioactive particles, to prevent further damage over time and keeping the patient alive and in relative comfort.
VLM 10y ago
Yes, plenty. The problem is radiation is incredibly wide ranging including wildly different materials and effects. Much like there isn't "the" treatment for electricity. You mean UV damage to the eyes from being exposed to arcs or thermal explosions or shock to heart or RF burns or ... and radiation is the same. Also some of the stuff he did was questionable purely chemically. So ... boring holes in lead, you're at least washing your hands before eating, right? Or the feeling I get from this guy, no. Or his refining process involving lithium metal, interesting but not advisable. I wonder what the guys "banana equivalent dose" was. He didn't get that much material, at least as reported by the press. A thousand times nothing is still nothing unless the true story is more interesting. From what I can find an unmolested smoke detector is about a tenth of a BED/yr so the mere presence of a thousand detectors in one room, if you sit in it for the entire year, is about the same as eating 100 bananas in that year, which I probably do! If you're sloppy and it stays outside your body its about the same. Unless you inhale it. He accumulated more "stuff" than the NRC feels safe to give out unlicensed, but the NRC is pretty pessimistic so he should have survived. And seemed to have done so, unsurprisingly.
- maxerickson 10y ago
  Yes, plenty. So what are they?
  - VLM 10y ago
    To start there's triage. Go away and come back for cancer screening every five years. Stay here and we treat you. You're toast here's some painkillers. In between there's a wide mix of removing the cause and repairing the damage. This almost seems too obvious but there's obvious recent surface decontamination, wash it off. A test tube in the lab shattered, well get it all off you first of all. Only a step past that, if you chug heavy water you'll be encouraged to drink tap water to pee out the heavy water. Likewise if you ate something contaminated an hour or a day ago they'll give you stuff to make your digestive system explode out both ends. I donno if they'd feed you an expectorant for inhalation. There's no point if the exposure was months ago of course. There are peculiar specific treatments if you've been recently exposed to iodine isotopes from a bomb or very major plant accident they can flood your system with zero radioactivity clean iodine to convince your body to pee out 99% of your intake rather than adsorbing 100% of the bad stuff into your thyroid. Its like reducing your exposure by a factor of 100 just by popping some pills. There are other isotopes like that I can't remember. If you were doing radioactive labeling experiments obviously they'd flood your body with unlabeled clean stuff to make you pee the glowing stuff out. If its a bone-seeker there are mineral chleation treatments that are very hard on the skeleton but you'll pee out those isotopes which is better than having them irradiate you from the inside for decades. If you wipe out your bone marrow you're screwed unless you get a bone marrow transplant. In the short term they could pump units of blood into you. This works better if there's one victim per hospital than if there's an entire Japanese city and the hospital was vaporized, which is why not too much was done along these lines at the end of WWII. Similar to the above paragraph if you wipe out your digestive tract alongside 100K neighbors there's not much the hospitals can do, but if it was an unfortunate lab accident, you might be kept alive via IV until recovery. If its a surface burn I'm not sure what they'd do WRT preventative skin cancer, maybe skin graft it on general principles or wait and watch and see if a tumor forms. Obviously there's antibiotic treatment.

I do recall a few years back a drug being refereed to as real life version of Rad Away from the Fallout game series. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex-Rad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex-Rad

centizen 10y ago
From the sounds of it, it's more like Rad-X from the same games. (Rad-X increases your radiation resistance, RadAway removes radiation poisoning)
- gohrt 10y ago
  I wonder how the game and its impact would be different if they refused to make RadAway part of the game.

centizen 10y ago

Unfortunately, radiation poisoning is an often irreversible process - it involves the destruction of cells, muscle and tissue at a molecular level in a way that our bodies never were designed to be recover from. Majority of medical practices in this space focus on removing ingested or inhaled radioactive particles, to prevent further damage over time and keeping the patient alive and in relative comfort.

VLM 10y ago

Yes, plenty. The problem is radiation is incredibly wide ranging including wildly different materials and effects. Much like there isn't "the" treatment for electricity. You mean UV damage to the eyes from being exposed to arcs or thermal explosions or shock to heart or RF burns or ... and radiation is the same. Also some of the stuff he did was questionable purely chemically. So ... boring holes in lead, you're at least washing your hands before eating, right? Or the feeling I get from this guy, no. Or his refining process involving lithium metal, interesting but not advisable. I wonder what the guys "banana equivalent dose" was. He didn't get that much material, at least as reported by the press. A thousand times nothing is still nothing unless the true story is more interesting. From what I can find an unmolested smoke detector is about a tenth of a BED/yr so the mere presence of a thousand detectors in one room, if you sit in it for the entire year, is about the same as eating 100 bananas in that year, which I probably do! If you're sloppy and it stays outside your body its about the same. Unless you inhale it. He accumulated more "stuff" than the NRC feels safe to give out unlicensed, but the NRC is pretty pessimistic so he should have survived. And seemed to have done so, unsurprisingly.

maxerickson 10y ago
Yes, plenty. So what are they?
- VLM 10y ago
  To start there's triage. Go away and come back for cancer screening every five years. Stay here and we treat you. You're toast here's some painkillers. In between there's a wide mix of removing the cause and repairing the damage. This almost seems too obvious but there's obvious recent surface decontamination, wash it off. A test tube in the lab shattered, well get it all off you first of all. Only a step past that, if you chug heavy water you'll be encouraged to drink tap water to pee out the heavy water. Likewise if you ate something contaminated an hour or a day ago they'll give you stuff to make your digestive system explode out both ends. I donno if they'd feed you an expectorant for inhalation. There's no point if the exposure was months ago of course. There are peculiar specific treatments if you've been recently exposed to iodine isotopes from a bomb or very major plant accident they can flood your system with zero radioactivity clean iodine to convince your body to pee out 99% of your intake rather than adsorbing 100% of the bad stuff into your thyroid. Its like reducing your exposure by a factor of 100 just by popping some pills. There are other isotopes like that I can't remember. If you were doing radioactive labeling experiments obviously they'd flood your body with unlabeled clean stuff to make you pee the glowing stuff out. If its a bone-seeker there are mineral chleation treatments that are very hard on the skeleton but you'll pee out those isotopes which is better than having them irradiate you from the inside for decades. If you wipe out your bone marrow you're screwed unless you get a bone marrow transplant. In the short term they could pump units of blood into you. This works better if there's one victim per hospital than if there's an entire Japanese city and the hospital was vaporized, which is why not too much was done along these lines at the end of WWII. Similar to the above paragraph if you wipe out your digestive tract alongside 100K neighbors there's not much the hospitals can do, but if it was an unfortunate lab accident, you might be kept alive via IV until recovery. If its a surface burn I'm not sure what they'd do WRT preventative skin cancer, maybe skin graft it on general principles or wait and watch and see if a tumor forms. Obviously there's antibiotic treatment.