Wisdom or Progress

From the beginning of the last century through the 1960s, no one feared radiation. It was everywhere, right alongside cigarettes.

It was ignorance, and at the same time the height of modern medicine.

The wondrous X-rays allowed doctors to see inside the human body without cutting it open. They were fast, effective and, everyone believed, completely safe.

They were considered so safe that even shoe stores installed X-ray machines to measure children's feet and choose shoes. Mothers would bring their children every week and watch the tiny bones of their feet glowing on the screen while salespeople found “the perfect fit.”

Ignorance and safety went hand in hand all the way to the clinics, where dermatologists aimed X-rays at teenagers' faces to “cure” acne, delivering doses we now know were catastrophically high.

It was considered so safe that beverage companies offered bottled drinks containing radioactive radium and marketed them as energy drinks. Athletes and the wealthy drank them and swore by them. One well-known brand was called “Radithor,” marketed under the slogan “Perpetual Sunshine.”

Eben Byers, an industrial tycoon who died of radiation poisoning in 1932, drank it religiously. When his body was exhumed years later, it was still radioactive. His bones had crumbled. His skull was full of holes.

Perpetual sunshine, they called it back then.

The year is 1963. A huge X-ray machine, the size of a car engine, hovers just a few centimeters above a woman's throat, aimed straight at her thyroid gland, and she lies there calmly because the doctors told her the glow in her bones is “healthy energy.” So healthy that she could no longer walk, and her jawbone crumbled in her hands. The doctors are sure of themselves, and no one there is wearing protection: not the patient, not the doctors, and there isn't even a lead apron in the room.

None of them knew.

They didn't know that radiation accumulates. That every exposure matters a great deal. They didn't know that the thyroid gland is highly sensitive to radiation damage.

Did they really not know?

They didn't imagine that years later, thyroid cancer rates would soar. And that they themselves, standing unprotected treatment after treatment, would develop leukemia and die young.

They didn't know because no one had done the long-term studies. No one followed up on the patients or asked the uncomfortable questions, because asking meant slowing down, and slowing down meant falling behind. Progress was the top priority and the most politically correct thing there was.

Does that remind you of anything lately?

But by the 1960s this was old news, because medicine had advanced... X-rays were routine and radiation was considered modern.

Modernization today is considered progress, which in industrial terms means pushing forward, not looking back. But sometimes, stopping for a moment to look at what we have created brings wisdom, which is the true gift of progress.

It took decades and tens of thousands of victims before modern medicine, with all its supposedly advanced science, finally faced the price of its overconfidence.

In the 1970s and '80s, the regulations changed. Lead aprons became mandatory. Exposure limits were set. Radiologists began working behind protective barriers. The industry, which had once treated radiation as magic, finally admitted that it is a carcinogenic poison.

But the reckoning came too late for that generation, and there is no one to settle the debt.

Too late for the women who developed cancer.

Too late for the factory workers who poured glowing radium onto the dials of those miraculous watches that shone in the dark, and who died with their bones glowing in their graves.

Too late for the children whose feet were X-rayed every time their mothers bought them shoes, and who died in agony.

The fact that we now know what they didn't know then hasn't stopped “progress.” Today we see the danger they couldn't see. We understand that the doctors in their clean white coats and confident postures unknowingly harmed the very people they meant to heal. And unknowingly they also stepped out into the hallways to smoke “Camels” and even boasted that it was good for the lungs.

They were ignorant people with degrees.

But here is the harder truth: we are still doing it.

Today we're told that cell phone radiation is safe, that Wi-Fi radiation is within a reasonable range, that wireless earbuds, microwave ovens and electric cars are tested and approved. These are the hallmarks of progress, giving everything a high-tech sheen.

And we believe and we buy, because after all, this is the science of progress, isn't it?

Right now, there are medical procedures we consider routine that future generations will look back on with horror. CT machines, which emit the equivalent of hundreds of X-rays per minute, are just one of many examples of technologies we trust that have not been studied for long enough.

And I haven't even mentioned the thousands of chemicals we use so generously.

They were wrong.

Not because they were negligent, but because they got confused there in academia: they mixed up innovation with wisdom. They mistook novelty for safety and believed that moving fast mattered more than moving carefully.

When consciousness lags behind technology, a culture wipes itself out.

The history of medicine tells the story of unseen victims whose suffering taught us what we should have learned another way. It still goes on every day in thousands of hospitals around the world. Medical malpractice, causing direct harm that leads to death, is now the fourth leading cause of death. Some claim that in certain places it is already the third...

And it's happening right now, as we breathe. Somewhere, right now, in a sterile room with modern equipment and well-meaning professionals, someone is receiving a treatment that future generations will learn is deadly.

The fact that radiation is the second most common cancer treatment today only shows that we haven't come very far, even as progress shouts “Charge ahead!”

To days of wisdom,

Ran