[HN Gopher] Low-dose radiation offers relief to people with knee...
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Low-dose radiation offers relief to people with knee osteoarthritis
Author : geox
Score : 96 points
Date : 2025-09-29 22:44 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.astro.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.astro.org)
| nikolay wrote:
| 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-...
| Plankaluel wrote:
| 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.
| vixen99 wrote:
| 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"
| groos wrote:
| 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.
| wat10000 wrote:
| 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.
| justin66 wrote:
| Similar treatments exist without the radioactive water.
| kakacik wrote:
| 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.
| mionhe wrote:
| I'm not clear on what the second paragraph is adding to your
| example in the first.
| clarionbell wrote:
| 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.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| Off topic: I just learned a couple weeks ago that Czechia
| and Czech Republic are both acceptable names for the
| country.
| phoronixrly wrote:
| > 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.
| zdragnar wrote:
| I heard some Amish talking about their parents taking a trip to
| Montana to visit the radon mines for arthritis.
|
| An example here: https://www.radonmine.com/facility/
|
| There's quite a few out that way.
| davibu wrote:
| 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...
| djtango wrote:
| Gy has a mass component to it. Is 3Gy on just your joint
| different to 3Gy of your whole body?
| khuey wrote:
| 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.
| f4uCL9dNSnQm wrote:
| The abstract indicates 6 fractions (so 0.5Gy for each). And 3
| is low compared to cancer treatments, which go up to 80 Gy.
| greenavocado wrote:
| 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.
| layer8 wrote:
| For a moment I was confused that radiation doses would be
| measured in gigayears.
| dmwood wrote:
| 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.
| hulitu wrote:
| > Low-dose radiation offers relief to people with knee
| osteoarthritis
|
| Radon girls anyone ? /s
| mmastrac wrote:
| 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.
| el_benhameen wrote:
| 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
| CjHuber wrote:
| So we are going full circle now?
| nyc_data_geek wrote:
| Radiation is good for you now, a little bit, as a treat.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| 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).
| nsxwolf wrote:
| The residential radon mitigation industry does not like this.
| trhway wrote:
| 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.
| lupusreal wrote:
| 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.
| lupusreal wrote:
| 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.
| toss1 wrote:
| Perhaps the word you are looking for is "conjecture that the
| risk from radiation ..." ??
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| Like sunlight on skin?
| prmph wrote:
| There is the alternative observation that sometimes the
| effect of harmful things is based on the _frequency_ and
| _length_ of exposure, not so much its magnitude.
|
| Compare with the CTE, where a few bone-crushing traumas do
| not seem to cause it, but chronic long-term low grade impacts
| is more likely to cause it.
|
| Another example, I probably could eat a massive amount of
| processed meat a few times without much ill effect, but years
| of eating moderate amounts might do you in.
| hangonhn wrote:
| 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.
| toast0 wrote:
| It says coal tar right on the bottle. And it smells awful.
| And it can be pretty effective.
| mmastrac wrote:
| 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.
| NoiseBert69 wrote:
| 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.
| eig wrote:
| 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.
| munificent wrote:
| _> It 's essentially like localized steroids to just the joint-
| killing off the immune cells causing inflammation._
|
| Are you confusing osteoarthritis with rheumatoid arthritis? I
| didn't think the pain of osteoarthritis had anything to do with
| the immune response. You've literally got bone rubbing against
| bone. It's not going to feel good.
| p1dda wrote:
| 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.
| olejorgenb wrote:
| https://physicians.dukehealth.org/articles/stem-cell-therapy...
|
| Which countries is it a available/approved in?
| dinkblam wrote:
| stuck in cloudflare for 3 seconds so i cancelled loading the
| website
|
| why to web admins think this is acceptable for visitors?
| Havoc wrote:
| Tom Scott made a video about a related treatment - radon caves a
| couple years ago
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZkusjDFlS0
| sparky_z wrote:
| Interesting. Now I have a question about that video, and I
| think I'm more likely to get a good answer from someone here
| than in the comments there, so here goes:
|
| Tom says that because that's the only radon cave that can turn
| the flow of radon on and off at will, it's the only place where
| you could (in theory) run a double-blind experiment on radon
| exposure therapy.
|
| My question is: would it not be just as possible to do that in
| a laboratory setting? Surely there are already lab facilities
| in the world that are set up for double blind "exposure"
| experiments of that sort, with easy control of dosages, flow
| rates, etc. Is the problem that radon gas too expensive to
| harvest or store safely? Why is that cave the only feasible
| option?
|
| EDIT: It now occurs to me that the answer could be "because the
| half life of radon is to short to transport it, so you would
| basically have to generate it in the lab by getting an enormous
| amount of uranium in one place and letting it decay and find
| some way of filtering the byproducts to isolate the radon in a
| way that putting it under a huge layer of bedrock does
| naturally." Sounds plausible to me, but does anyone know if
| that's the case?
| clarionbell wrote:
| 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...
| pfdietz wrote:
| 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.
| prmph wrote:
| Exactly, it could be that a few pretty high exposures are
| actually less damaging than frequent low but clinically
| significant exposures.
| lostlogin wrote:
| I think the point of the article is that there hasn't been a
| lot of evidence for low dose radiation as a treatment.
| 6d6b73 wrote:
| How soon will some entrepreneur open a spa in Chernobyl?
| bobsmooth wrote:
| Way ahead of you https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZkusjDFlS0
| nradov wrote:
| 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/
| hollerith wrote:
| 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 went without any access
| to calories for days almost never, but often endured stretches of
| days in which their calorie intake was less than a sustainable
| level, 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.
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