Healing Energy

An explosion of quackery: Part III

Ebenezer McBurney Byers was rich and it was the roaring twenties. He had everything going for him. The son of an industrialist, he’d been to Yale, earned a reputation as a sportsman, and won the 1906 US Amateur golf championship. As chairman of the Girard Iron Company, he had an even brighter future. But in 1927 he fell from his private railway sleeping berth, injuring his arm. Chronic pain followed. On his physio’s advice, he started taking an expensive patent medicine called Radithor.

There was a lot wrong here. First, William JA Bailey, the manufacturer of Radithor, only claimed to be a doctor of medicine, like a recent plasma-pusher.¹^⌘ Second, Bailey offered a 16% kickback to prescribers. Finally, Radithor actually contained radium: the bottle glowed gently in the dark. Bailey guaranteed at least 2 microcuries per bottle. And he delivered.

Radium

Marie Skłodowska-Curie and her husband Pierre Curie discovered radium within uranium ores in late 1898, and by 1910 they’d isolated minute amounts of the pure metal. Radium is a rather weird alkaline earth that, on exposure to air, reacts with nitrogen rather than oxygen. It’s also fucking radioactive.

In the early 1900s, radium became all the rage. It was in the self-luminous paints that killed the ‘Radium girls’ who applied it to watch and clock dials; it was used to make water laden with radon gas, which was then drunk; it was even included in cosmetics.² And, naturally, it found its way into patent medicines.

The problem with radiation is that it’s insidious. Unless you do something really daft like embracing the heart of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, ages can pass before you succumb.³ So let’s look at dosing—but skip to the poisoning section if your eyes start glazing over.

Dosing

I’ve always found measures of radiation puzzling. And no wonder! The unit of radioactivity was initially the curie (Ci, still used in the US), a ridiculously large amount of radiation—the amount coming from one gram of radium-226. Eben Byers consumed a total of just under 3 milligrams of the element, or 3 mCi.

We can also count each decay of a radioactive atom, using a Geiger counter. The becquerel (Bq) is the number of decays per second. This international unit is tiny. For example, the total amount of potassium-40 in the average human body produces about 4400 Bq. There are 37,000,000,000 Bq in a curie (37 GBq).

But ultimately it’s about dosing. The gray (Gy) is the international unit here, the delivery of one joule of ionising radiation energy per kilogram of matter. That’s huge. A whole-body acute dose of about 8 Gy will almost always kill you within a fortnight. (The US of course has its own measure, the rad, which is equal to 0.01 Gy.)

We also have the sievert (Sv). Why the extra unit? This is a measure of risk from radiation. Radiation causes genetic damage and cancer, and so we’re rather keen to know what the biological effects will be, given a certain dose. The International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) describes the sievert as the equivalent biological effect of the deposit of a joule of radiation energy in a kilogram of human tissue.⁴ Practically, one sievert confers a 5.5% lifetime risk of cancer (p 53), with a weighting towards children. (The US uses the rem, where 1 Sv = 100 rem).

Here’s where it becomes tricky, as equivalent dose (H_T) depends on the amount of delivered radiation, the type of radiation, and the tissue irradiated.⁵

With CT scans you’ll also encounter the DLP or dose-length product, measured in mGy.cm. This is the energy deposited per CT scan slice, times the scan length. CT images always have this, so the following table is like gold to the practising clinician.

Poisoning, then

You can get chronic radium poisoning from under 10 µCi. Eben Byers received an estimated 2800 µCi. That’s about 10⁸ Becquerels, split between Ra-226 and Ra-228. The tricky bit here is 1 Gy of radiation from alpha particles causes 20 times as much damage as 1 Gy from, say, gamma rays.⁶

In the body, radium behaves like calcium, enters bone, and intensely irradiates local tissue with alpha particles. This makes it difficult to convert Eben’s 2.8 mCi to sieverts. Here are the ICRP conversion factors (p 53) for ingested radium:

Gut absorption is f. Crudely multiplying, that’s a swingeing 10 Sv to the bones.⁷ Eben lost teeth. Then his upper jaw fell to pieces, followed by a lot of the rest of his skeleton. You may encounter disturbing Internet pictures of him, sans upper and lower jaws. He died on 31 March, 1932. Ra-226 has a half-life of 1600 years, so that lead coffin will need to last.

Radium stopped being cool

When Byers died, sensational newspaper articles about his death caught the public attention. Enthusiasm for radium sagged (and the FDA stepped in). Radium was used a bit in industrial radiography and human radiation therapy, but even this dwindled. In the 21^st century, it’s not used much, apart from arcane physics experiments.⁸

We’ve now done both herbs^⌘ and radiation, but we’re not quite done. Wherever ‘energy’ is mentioned, quacks are not far behind. Let’s take a brief glance. But like Chernobyl, you don’t want to be in this control room for too long. There’s no radiation, but some of the crazy might just rub off.

Electrifying

The term ‘electricus’ was coined by English scientist William Gilbert in 1600, from the Greek word for amber, but it took 60 years for German inventor Otto von Guericke to build the first electrostatic generator. In 1752, Benjamin Franklin famously didn’t die when mucking around with lightning.

In 1774, German doctor Franz Anton Mesmer came up with ‘animal magnetism’ and lectured on how he could heal people using “the body’s own magnetic fluid”, spawning an entire industry of ‘magnetizers’. People still buy healing magnets.

After Alessandro Volta invented the first true battery in 1800, there was a huge outpouring of ‘medical electricity’: electric corsets (above, simply magnetic); the electric Heidelberg Belt (for ‘nervous diseases of all kinds’ and for some reason also said to be good for glomerulonephritis); and an electric hairbrush for baldness (more magnets). Electric bathtubs sold in large numbers, known as ‘Franklinization’. Don’t ask. But people weren’t happy with just ordinary energy.

Mystic energies

If you think the ‘electromagnetic mystics’ are bad, just wait for the rest. ‘Vibrations’ are huge in the quackosphere. I’m reluctant to dig too deep. I googled “law of vibration”—and wept. I found that Deepak Chopra, always big on ‘vibration’, is now selling it with AI. There’s ‘energy’ everywhere but not as we know it.

Google “vibrational energy” and half of your hits will likely match up to actual molecular bond physics, where the frequencies are in the region of 10¹³ Hz. Much of the rest is woo. And what woo!

Perhaps the weirdest I’ve come across (yet) is ‘orgone energy’, kicked off in the 1930s by Wilhelm Reich, and later punted by Charles Kelley. Pelvic thrusting may be involved. Reich dreamt this all up after reading Freud, and immediately proposed cancer cures. He also felt that orgone energy could free the oppressed masses by giving them good orgasms.

Equal opportunity quackery?

Most such quacks seem to be men. Take the Dynomizer, invented in 1917 by quack Albert Abrams. He claimed to be able to diagnose all your ailments with a single drop of blood. But isn’t this strangely similar to Elizabeth Holmes, Stanford School of Engineering dropout who formed the Theranos we know all too well? Abrams however went one better: if you balked at the blood sample, you could submit a handwriting sample instead!

Back to Doh!

To end, have a look at the above cutting from Popular Science Monthly, 1923: It promises us “longer life, new hair on bald heads, and a third set of natural teeth”.

“Even now, Doctor Field believes, radioactive treatment may prolong life at least 15 years”.

It seems we’ve come full circle, to my previous posts on longevity.^⌘ One way or another, we all seem to be suckers. But a simple question remains: “Why?” Why do we succumb so easily? I’ll try to answer this in my next post.

My 2c, Dr Jo.

^{⌘ This signifies past posts where I explore in more detail.}

1. Dentist William Herbert Rollins started warning about the dangers of radiation in 1901, but few listened. According to Claudia Clark’s Radium Girls: Women and Industrial Health Reform, medical authorities were already warning about radium ingestion by 1925. ‘Radium necrosis’ was in the press. In the US, the Advisory Committee on X-ray and Radium Protection was formed in 1929.

2. It’s uncertain whether Marie Curie’s death from aplastic anaemia was related to excessive X-ray exposure, or excessive radium. She likely had both.

3. Immediately after the explosion, the radiation level in the control room was sufficient for you to acquire a lethal dose within one minute.

4. The ICRP was effectively formed in 1928 in Sweden. Representatives of the nuclear industry tend to become a bit excited whenever cancer is mentioned, especially if the words “linear no-threshold model” are uttered. This likely deserves a post of its own.

5. We add up the products of the weighting factor w and the absorbed dose D, by radiation type (R) and tissue type (T).

\(H_{T}=\underset{R}{\sum}w_{R}\times D_{T,R}\)

6. The weighting factor w_R for alpha particles is about 20.

7. That’s very conservative, for several reasons. Detailed analysis gave a cumulative skeletal radiation dose of over 350 Sv!

8. Although recently there’s been a resurgence of interest in the use of Ra-223 for castration-resistant prostate cancer with bony metastases.