This might be one of those cures that works like the old T-Gel shampoo (ie: carcinogenic coal tar that turned out to be immune-suppressing enough to prevent dandruff eventually caused cancer).
Though, at the ages when Osteoarthritis shows up, it might be better to take on a smaller risk of monitor-able extremity cancer than the pretty large QoL reduction of severe arthritis.
There is a theory (theory! very theoretical) that the risk from radiation does not scale linearly and that low doses of radiation might actually be protective. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis
It's probably reasonable to say that radiation actually being beneficial is very theoretical, but the linear no-threshold model of harm from radiation is definitely in the theoretical category too. It's used because it's very conservative, but evidence supporting it for low radiation dosages is very weak.
Ra-di-a-tion. Yes, indeed. You hear the most outrageous lies about it. Half-baked goggle-box do-gooders telling everybody it's bad for you. Pernicious nonsense. Everybody could stand a hundred chest X-rays a year. They ought to have them, too.
radon radiation is primarily alpha. That is never good in any dose.
>In this multicenter trial, researchers enrolled 114 patients with moderate-to-mild knee osteoarthritis across three academic centers in Korea. Participants were randomly assigned to receive one of two radiation regimens — a very low dose (0.3 Gy) or a low dose (3 Gy)
This is gamma. Those doses are "low" because delivery here is localized. If given full-body the 3Gy has something like 25-50% mortality.
The cancer patient are delivered like 20-80Gy into the tumor and surrounding tissues which just kills cells outright.
It's not really the radiation from radon itself which is the problem, but rather radon's daughters. Radon is a noble gas, so it's not going to accumulate in you and doesn't get much chance to do damage to people even if they inhale it; they'll just exhale it moments later before barely any of it can decay. But radon's daughters, the chain of atoms which are produced from the decay of radon and each other, aren't gases, so if stagnant air with radon sticks around it's going to 'rain' an atomic dust of radioactive isotopes which can accumulate and, if disturbed, can be inhaled and stick with people.
Wow! I've actually used T-Gel because I used to get dandruff really bad as a teen and it was pretty effective. It's horrifying to know what it really was.
I used it briefly and then researched it and it seemed like at the time (mid-2000s), nobody could say which of the menagerie of components of the coal tar was actually the effective one.
A recent Peter Attia Drive podcast has an interview with Dr. Sanjay Mehta, a radiation oncologist who has recently also started using low-dose radiation to treat arthritis. Empirically the results seem quite encouraging.
Glad to see this! We need better treatments for OA short of a joint replacement.
I'm not too surprised that this treatment works. It's essentially like localized steroids to just the joint- killing off the immune cells causing inflammation.
Good features is that it's localized (so no systemic immunosuppression) and the risk of cancer is low since you rarely get radiation-induced cancer in joints because there's not enough dividing cells. Unfortunately heading to radiotherapy is a logistical challenge, but there are enough people suffering from OA that would happily do this to get relief.
For centuries, in Bulgaria, since Roman times, people have been bathing in slightly radioactive water to treat osteoarthritis. I'm not sure how this is news or an invention when it's been around for centuries and has been the standard of care in Bulgaria for decades. There are sanatoriums and spa centers in Pavel Banya, Bulgaria [0], and I know many friends who go there once or twice a year for treatments and swear they couldn't live without them!
Just because something has been done for hundreds of years does not mean it has been scientifically shown to actually do more than placebo.
A lot of people do a lot of stuff that has been proven to do nothing detectable, and they still swear by it.
"It has been done for hundreds of years" isn't a good argument. There is a reason "Appeal to tradition" is one of the more famous logical fallacies.
Also: The radiation doses used in this trial are very likely much, much higher than what you would get from such a bath in radioactive water (otherwise the water would be so radioactive that staying in there or even drinking it would kill you very quickly), so this doesn't really tell us anything about whether the traditional modalities do anything or not. And yes, stuff like that also exists in Austria with Radon caves, and many other places.
Modern medicine is hardly logical where therapies are concerned. There is often not any coherent theory of why a therapy works and yet it may be commonly used in treatments. If you examine the literature supplied with your drugs, it often states "exact mechanism of action is unknown but yada yada". This is why there are double blind studies in medicine. Absent a theory, this is the only way to gauge the effectiveness of a therapy. Hence, if bathing in slightly radioactive waters has provided beneficial to people over a long period of time, you can't dismiss it as "appealing to tradition". It may need validation with a study but can't be ignored as just tradition.
The fact that it's been done over a long period of time does not prove that it's beneficial. As you say, that's why there are double-blind studies. If the only evidence of benefit is that it's been done for a long time, that literally is just tradition. It's worth looking into it to see if it works, but there are plenty of traditional remedies with long histories that don't.
There are also old radon baths in Jachymov in Czech republic working on same principle. Exactly for same primary purpose - problems with joints and bones.
Then communists made local uranium mines/gulags for 'enemies of the state' which was basically a prolonged death sentence, many were just beaten to death or died from cold/starvation.
3 Gy is nowhere near what could be qualified as a "Low dose".
"A whole-body acute exposure to 5 grays or more of high-energy radiation usually leads to death within 14 days. LD1 is 2.5 Gy, LD50 is 5 Gy and LD99 is 8 Gy.[11] The LD50 dose represents 375 joules for a 75 kg adult. " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_(unit)#Radiation_poisonin...
Gray (Gy) - measures energy deposited per kilogram of tissue. Think of it like measuring how many bullets hit a target, not how much damage they do.
Sievert (Sv) - measures biological damage. This accounts for the fact that different types of radiation and different tissues react differently. Think of this as the actual damage done.
The bullet's energy is identical in all cases (same Gy), but the biological damage varies wildly (different Sv).
The same energy deposited (Gy) causes vastly different biological damage (Sv) depending on:
What tissue (bone marrow is like your heart - critical; muscle is more resilient)
What radiation type (alpha particles are like hollow-point bullets - more damaging per energy unit; gamma rays are like full metal jacket - cleaner pass-through)
For most medical purposes (X-rays, gamma rays), 1 Gy is approx 1 Sv, which is why people use them interchangeably and add to confusion.
Location and delivery matter enormously. It's like pouring water. Put 3 liters in your lungs, you drown (dead). Put 3 liters on your hand, your hand gets wet (annoying but harmless).
3 Gy to your whole body at once is potentially fatal. You'll likely die within weeks from bone marrow failure, your blood cells can't regenerate. 3 Gy to a small tumor in your knee is a typical treatment session. The rest of your body gets almost nothing, and your bone marrow keeps working fine. 3 Gy spread over 6 sessions (0.5 Gy each) to a localized area is a very low dose that gives tissue time to repair.
A gray is a measure of energy deposition per unit mass. 1 Gy to the entire body is very different than 1 Gy to a particular part of the body, especially since some parts of the body are far more sensitive to radiation than others.
Depending on the field, 3 Gy IS 'small' (with respect to doses to tissue during cancer treatment, which can be 60 Gy). Whole body doses of 1 milliGy in the environmental biz are considered worth examination. Even investigations of biomarkers for radiation exposure typically use doses in the range of 3 Gy.
This should be a reminder that we have no evidence that the Linear no threshold model of radiation exposure is accurate. In fact, we have compelling evidence against it. But due to rather aggressive lobbying effort by anti-nuclear activists, we are stuck with this idea for the time being.
It's simply the default that was decided on as the most conservative option possible, but that's pretty much it.
Radioactive baths have a rather long pedigree. In Jachymov, Czech Republic, they are used for over century. Sometimes they are even covered by health insurance.
Some anti-nuclear activists are against LNT because they think it understates the effect of low dose radiation.
The conservative approach would be to assume low dose radiation has the maximum effect not ruled out by evidence. This would be higher than predicted by LNT.
Exposure to radiation up-regulates
genes involved in DNA repair pathways,
genes associated with antioxidant
defense (notably those downstream of the Nrf2
transcription factor) and autophagy-related genes (which are crucial for the degradation and
recycling of cellular components).
Fasting does all those things, too -- without introducing random errors into one's DNA. Basically everyone under 40 should do regular fasts of some form, and those that do will probably derive no additional benefit from exposure to ionizing radiation, i.e., the type of radiation being promoted by the OP. (People older than 40 need to worry about losing muscle mass during a fast since old people find it very hard regain muscle mass once it it lost. Actually it is likely that only people over 60 or 65 might have to worry about muscle mass: experts disagree on the best cut-off age, and 40 years old's is the lowest I have seen.)
Three days of fasting has all of the benefits I list above, but there are risks to going completely without calories for that long, and actually our ancestors probably never went without any access to calories, but rather endured times in which their calorie intake was less than ideal, but not zero. To reduce the risks of going completely without calories for 3 days at a time, longevity researchers have devised the "fasting-mimicking diet", which give over the course of 5 days most or all of the benefits as eating no calories at all for 3 days. It restricts calories to about 800 calories per day with only 10% of that coming from protein and is the type of fasting that most people should be doing.
FMD requires no interaction with or prescription from the health-care industry and costs nothing except the time and attention needed to learn how to count calories if one has never done that before.
I'd much more prefer allogeneic stem cell treatment for osteoarthitis. It's a shame it's not available in all those countries where millions of dollars are made by companies making knee joint replacement prosthesis. What a coincidence.
This might be one of those cures that works like the old T-Gel shampoo (ie: carcinogenic coal tar that turned out to be immune-suppressing enough to prevent dandruff eventually caused cancer).
Though, at the ages when Osteoarthritis shows up, it might be better to take on a smaller risk of monitor-able extremity cancer than the pretty large QoL reduction of severe arthritis.
There is a theory (theory! very theoretical) that the risk from radiation does not scale linearly and that low doses of radiation might actually be protective. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis
It's probably reasonable to say that radiation actually being beneficial is very theoretical, but the linear no-threshold model of harm from radiation is definitely in the theoretical category too. It's used because it's very conservative, but evidence supporting it for low radiation dosages is very weak.
Perhaps the word you are looking for is "conjecture that the risk from radiation ..." ??
So we are going full circle now?
Radiation is good for you now, a little bit, as a treat.
Ra-di-a-tion. Yes, indeed. You hear the most outrageous lies about it. Half-baked goggle-box do-gooders telling everybody it's bad for you. Pernicious nonsense. Everybody could stand a hundred chest X-rays a year. They ought to have them, too.
J. Frank Parnell (from the movie Repo Man).
The residential radon mitigation industry does not like this.
radon radiation is primarily alpha. That is never good in any dose.
>In this multicenter trial, researchers enrolled 114 patients with moderate-to-mild knee osteoarthritis across three academic centers in Korea. Participants were randomly assigned to receive one of two radiation regimens — a very low dose (0.3 Gy) or a low dose (3 Gy)
This is gamma. Those doses are "low" because delivery here is localized. If given full-body the 3Gy has something like 25-50% mortality.
The cancer patient are delivered like 20-80Gy into the tumor and surrounding tissues which just kills cells outright.
The point is that "radiation" is multiparametric.
It's not really the radiation from radon itself which is the problem, but rather radon's daughters. Radon is a noble gas, so it's not going to accumulate in you and doesn't get much chance to do damage to people even if they inhale it; they'll just exhale it moments later before barely any of it can decay. But radon's daughters, the chain of atoms which are produced from the decay of radon and each other, aren't gases, so if stagnant air with radon sticks around it's going to 'rain' an atomic dust of radioactive isotopes which can accumulate and, if disturbed, can be inhaled and stick with people.
Wow! I've actually used T-Gel because I used to get dandruff really bad as a teen and it was pretty effective. It's horrifying to know what it really was.
I used it briefly and then researched it and it seemed like at the time (mid-2000s), nobody could say which of the menagerie of components of the coal tar was actually the effective one.
I stopped pretty much at that point.
It says coal tar right on the bottle. And it smells awful. And it can be pretty effective.
A recent Peter Attia Drive podcast has an interview with Dr. Sanjay Mehta, a radiation oncologist who has recently also started using low-dose radiation to treat arthritis. Empirically the results seem quite encouraging.
https://peterattiamd.com/sanjaymehta/
Glad to see this! We need better treatments for OA short of a joint replacement.
I'm not too surprised that this treatment works. It's essentially like localized steroids to just the joint- killing off the immune cells causing inflammation.
Good features is that it's localized (so no systemic immunosuppression) and the risk of cancer is low since you rarely get radiation-induced cancer in joints because there's not enough dividing cells. Unfortunately heading to radiotherapy is a logistical challenge, but there are enough people suffering from OA that would happily do this to get relief.
For centuries, in Bulgaria, since Roman times, people have been bathing in slightly radioactive water to treat osteoarthritis. I'm not sure how this is news or an invention when it's been around for centuries and has been the standard of care in Bulgaria for decades. There are sanatoriums and spa centers in Pavel Banya, Bulgaria [0], and I know many friends who go there once or twice a year for treatments and swear they couldn't live without them!
[0]: https://pavelbanyagrand.com/en/the-healing-mineral-water-in-...
Just because something has been done for hundreds of years does not mean it has been scientifically shown to actually do more than placebo. A lot of people do a lot of stuff that has been proven to do nothing detectable, and they still swear by it.
"It has been done for hundreds of years" isn't a good argument. There is a reason "Appeal to tradition" is one of the more famous logical fallacies.
Also: The radiation doses used in this trial are very likely much, much higher than what you would get from such a bath in radioactive water (otherwise the water would be so radioactive that staying in there or even drinking it would kill you very quickly), so this doesn't really tell us anything about whether the traditional modalities do anything or not. And yes, stuff like that also exists in Austria with Radon caves, and many other places.
Modern medicine is hardly logical where therapies are concerned. There is often not any coherent theory of why a therapy works and yet it may be commonly used in treatments. If you examine the literature supplied with your drugs, it often states "exact mechanism of action is unknown but yada yada". This is why there are double blind studies in medicine. Absent a theory, this is the only way to gauge the effectiveness of a therapy. Hence, if bathing in slightly radioactive waters has provided beneficial to people over a long period of time, you can't dismiss it as "appealing to tradition". It may need validation with a study but can't be ignored as just tradition.
The fact that it's been done over a long period of time does not prove that it's beneficial. As you say, that's why there are double-blind studies. If the only evidence of benefit is that it's been done for a long time, that literally is just tradition. It's worth looking into it to see if it works, but there are plenty of traditional remedies with long histories that don't.
Good point! Interestingly there is evidence that at least some life forms appear to benefit from 'highly radioactive' water.
https://hal.science/hal-03025146v1/file/Petit%20et%20al%2020...
"Direct Meta-Analyses Reveal Unexpected Microbial Life in the Highly Radioactive Water of an Operating Nuclear Reactor Core"
https://journals.asm.org/doi/pdf/10.1128/spectrum.01995-22
"Culturomics of Bacteria from Radon-Saturated Water of the World’s Oldest Radium Mine"
There are also old radon baths in Jachymov in Czech republic working on same principle. Exactly for same primary purpose - problems with joints and bones.
Then communists made local uranium mines/gulags for 'enemies of the state' which was basically a prolonged death sentence, many were just beaten to death or died from cold/starvation.
I'm not clear on what the second paragraph is adding to your example in the first.
It's a related and important historical fact that is not well known outside of Czechia. Why not share it with wider audience when given a chance.
Off topic: I just learned a couple weeks ago that Czechia and Czech Republic are both acceptable names for the country.
Similar treatments exist without the radioactive water.
> The mineral water in Pavel Banya is rich in the chemical element radon
> The mineral takes care of having radiant and beautiful skin, healthy bones and, of course, excellent brain functions.
Ah, yes, radiant skin.
3 Gy is nowhere near what could be qualified as a "Low dose".
"A whole-body acute exposure to 5 grays or more of high-energy radiation usually leads to death within 14 days. LD1 is 2.5 Gy, LD50 is 5 Gy and LD99 is 8 Gy.[11] The LD50 dose represents 375 joules for a 75 kg adult. " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_(unit)#Radiation_poisonin...
Gray (Gy) - measures energy deposited per kilogram of tissue. Think of it like measuring how many bullets hit a target, not how much damage they do.
Sievert (Sv) - measures biological damage. This accounts for the fact that different types of radiation and different tissues react differently. Think of this as the actual damage done.
The bullet's energy is identical in all cases (same Gy), but the biological damage varies wildly (different Sv).
The same energy deposited (Gy) causes vastly different biological damage (Sv) depending on:
What tissue (bone marrow is like your heart - critical; muscle is more resilient)
What radiation type (alpha particles are like hollow-point bullets - more damaging per energy unit; gamma rays are like full metal jacket - cleaner pass-through)
For most medical purposes (X-rays, gamma rays), 1 Gy is approx 1 Sv, which is why people use them interchangeably and add to confusion.
Location and delivery matter enormously. It's like pouring water. Put 3 liters in your lungs, you drown (dead). Put 3 liters on your hand, your hand gets wet (annoying but harmless).
3 Gy to your whole body at once is potentially fatal. You'll likely die within weeks from bone marrow failure, your blood cells can't regenerate. 3 Gy to a small tumor in your knee is a typical treatment session. The rest of your body gets almost nothing, and your bone marrow keeps working fine. 3 Gy spread over 6 sessions (0.5 Gy each) to a localized area is a very low dose that gives tissue time to repair.
A gray is a measure of energy deposition per unit mass. 1 Gy to the entire body is very different than 1 Gy to a particular part of the body, especially since some parts of the body are far more sensitive to radiation than others.
The abstract indicates 6 fractions (so 0.5Gy for each). And 3 is low compared to cancer treatments, which go up to 80 Gy.
For a moment I was confused that radiation doses would be measured in gigayears.
Gy has a mass component to it. Is 3Gy on just your joint different to 3Gy of your whole body?
Depending on the field, 3 Gy IS 'small' (with respect to doses to tissue during cancer treatment, which can be 60 Gy). Whole body doses of 1 milliGy in the environmental biz are considered worth examination. Even investigations of biomarkers for radiation exposure typically use doses in the range of 3 Gy.
Tom Scott made a video about a related treatment - radon caves a couple years ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZkusjDFlS0
This should be a reminder that we have no evidence that the Linear no threshold model of radiation exposure is accurate. In fact, we have compelling evidence against it. But due to rather aggressive lobbying effort by anti-nuclear activists, we are stuck with this idea for the time being.
It's simply the default that was decided on as the most conservative option possible, but that's pretty much it.
Radioactive baths have a rather long pedigree. In Jachymov, Czech Republic, they are used for over century. Sometimes they are even covered by health insurance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A9%C4%8Debn%C3%A9_l%C3%A1...
Some anti-nuclear activists are against LNT because they think it understates the effect of low dose radiation.
The conservative approach would be to assume low dose radiation has the maximum effect not ruled out by evidence. This would be higher than predicted by LNT.
I am offering my basement as a Radon spa. Anyone interested?
Dose can be controlled by switching off the forced ventilation and sealing the gas trap.
Exposure to radiation up-regulates genes involved in DNA repair pathways, genes associated with antioxidant defense (notably those downstream of the Nrf2 transcription factor) and autophagy-related genes (which are crucial for the degradation and recycling of cellular components).
Fasting does all those things, too -- without introducing random errors into one's DNA. Basically everyone under 40 should do regular fasts of some form, and those that do will probably derive no additional benefit from exposure to ionizing radiation, i.e., the type of radiation being promoted by the OP. (People older than 40 need to worry about losing muscle mass during a fast since old people find it very hard regain muscle mass once it it lost. Actually it is likely that only people over 60 or 65 might have to worry about muscle mass: experts disagree on the best cut-off age, and 40 years old's is the lowest I have seen.)
Three days of fasting has all of the benefits I list above, but there are risks to going completely without calories for that long, and actually our ancestors probably never went without any access to calories, but rather endured times in which their calorie intake was less than ideal, but not zero. To reduce the risks of going completely without calories for 3 days at a time, longevity researchers have devised the "fasting-mimicking diet", which give over the course of 5 days most or all of the benefits as eating no calories at all for 3 days. It restricts calories to about 800 calories per day with only 10% of that coming from protein and is the type of fasting that most people should be doing.
FMD requires no interaction with or prescription from the health-care industry and costs nothing except the time and attention needed to learn how to count calories if one has never done that before.
I'd much more prefer allogeneic stem cell treatment for osteoarthitis. It's a shame it's not available in all those countries where millions of dollars are made by companies making knee joint replacement prosthesis. What a coincidence.
https://physicians.dukehealth.org/articles/stem-cell-therapy...
Which countries is it a available/approved in?
How soon will some entrepreneur open a spa in Chernobyl?
Way ahead of you https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZkusjDFlS0
stuck in cloudflare for 3 seconds so i cancelled loading the website
why to web admins think this is acceptable for visitors?
> Low-dose radiation offers relief to people with knee osteoarthritis
Radon girls anyone ? /s