NOt necessarily. In fact ionizing radiation is highly helpful in food irradiation, industrial product irradiation, power generation, medical applications and cancer treatment and so on. Human life has evolved in high background radiation millions of years back and radiation is present everywhere. In water, food, air and air traveling also. Accidents can occur in every industry. YOu see Bhopal MIC accident. Possibly thousands were killed and no ionising radiation was involved.
Ionizing Radiation is of great benefit in detecting cancer, eliminating cancer and improving survival. But as valuable as it is in cancer diagnosis and treatment, ionizing radiation must be used carefully, because it can cause side effects such as burns and hair loss that become apparent soon after the exposure, or arise many years later in the form of secondary cancers.
In addition to its use for certain medical diagnosis in nuclear medicine and radiotherapy you can use also the ionizing radiation technique for sterilization purposes, for example to sterilize medical products without damaging the product and tissues used in transplantation operation in people suffering bone cancer, burns, among others.
Both good and bad exist for many things, and this is also the case for ionizing radiation. On one hand, there are benefits associated with the indispensable use of ionizing radiation in medicine and industry. On the other, ionizing radiation causes the detrimental effects (typically, either classified into stochastic effects and tissue reactions, or into somatic effects and heritable effects). Radiation protection aims to protect, at an appropriate level, humans and environments against such detrimental effects of radiation exposure without unduly limiting the desirable human actions that may be associated with such exposure. It is important to consider whether the overall benefits due to radiation exposure outweighs the harm (the process to do more good than harm, called justification).
In addition to ionizing radiation, there are so many other examples that have been proposed to behave like a double edged sword
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=double+edged+sword
For your interest, I have proposed high linear transfer (LET) radiation as a triple edged sword
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259472580_What_are_the_Intracellular_Targets_and_Intratissue_Target_Cells_for_Radiation_Effects
Article What are the Intracellular Targets and Intratissue Target Ce...
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Clinical Pharmacology
- Dosing