X-RAY RADIATION 101

One question I get asked a lot is:  Why do dental staff leave the room when x-rays are taken?  Are x-rays dangerous?  While the average patient has an x-ray taken once a year with a lead apron on, a dentist, hygienist or dental assistant takes dozens of x-rays all day long, day after day.  This equates to a thousand or more a year.  It would be a serious health concern for dental personnel to stay in the room with the patient while the x-ray is taken.  So it is simply a safety protocol.

Let's further look at the amount of radiation dental x-rays emit and why patients fear and resist dental x-rays. Many dentists, including myself, have invested in digital x-ray systems, the latest technology, which drastically reduces the already small amount of radiation conventional dental x-rays emit.

The digital x-rays we utilize reduces radiation 80 to 90% over the film based x-rays everyone has experienced through the years.  Let's compare the radiation one would receive from a digital x-ray to a medical chest x-ray or lower GI x-ray segment.  A full set of dental x-rays has 50 times less radiation exposure than a GI series and 15 times less than a chest x-ray.

As one of my dental school professors taught me, dentists' x-ray machines are like little pop guns compared to medical radiography, which more resemble howitzers.  Dental radiography is truly safe.  In dentistry, radiation from our x-ray units is emitted through a round tube or collimator that reduces scatter radiation to a 2 1/2" area.  Furthermore, dentists place a lead apron over your lower extremities as an added precaution.  In the days of high scatter radiation machines, a lead shield was very important.  Today the lead apron offers more peace of mind than actual protection, because stray radiation from modern digital x-ray machines is almost nonexistent.  Dental x-rays taken in a judicious fashion provide the dentist with an invaluable tool to diagnose hidden cavities between teeth, abscesses, cysts, jawbone cancer and tumors, and gum disease, to name some of the benefits.  My day is filled with scores of patients who could have saved hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars if they had had regular dental x-rays taken in a timely fashion.

Utilizing dental x-rays is like seeing not only the tip of an iceberg which floats in the ocean, but the total extent of the ice structure below the water surface.  We all know how that turned out for the Titanic!  The captain couldn't see, and therefore didn't have, the total picture to avert a terrible disaster!