Science: Health: Cancer
Radioactive Sand Castle Therapy   (+3)  [vote for, against]
A jar of sand... from Guarapari, Brazil's 20mSv beaches

I was thinking as I got my sandwich today, wouldn't it be easier if radiation/chemotherapy didn't involve being stuck on a chair or bed for hours while you're slowly poisoned? That's got to be a double whammy, thankfully I've never had cancer but my grandfather died of stomach cancer. It just seems like a bad way to go, you're already being eaten alive by tumors and then countering it with near lethal doses of toxins. To top it off... it's just dull!

Surely there could be a more pleasant way to ingest radiation? Which got me thinking... what about those 'hot' Brazil beaches I saw in Pandora's Promise? Guarapari, Brazil 20 mSv sandy beaches that are more or less as radioactive as the Fukushima fallout zone.

Call it a fools errand but surely playing with all that radiation would have some sort of effect on a body's tumor? Even if only placebo effect, the sheer relaxing activity of building a sandcastle has it's own healing powers. The calm, soothing feeling of sand pouring through your fingers, patting it down with a little shovel... All just melt your troubles away.

So instead of sitting in some room where people are being slowly poisoned to death... why not build some pretty sandcastles? I'm not trying to diminish the importance of chemo/radiation therapy but I do wish it wasn't quite as dismal.
-- Duck Lagrange, Jul 10 2015

'Hot' Beaches https://www.youtube...watch?v=RvgAx1yIKjg
Radioactive beaches in Brazil [Duck Lagrange, Jul 10 2015]

Videoactive sandbox http://imgur.com/gallery/rmUBwtB
[2 fries shy of a happy meal, Jul 11 2015]

Thorium, I presume. With daughter elements from radioactive decay. The thorium is far less dangerous than the daughter elements, but they are produced in rather small quantity...(due to half-life of thorium being something like 10 billion years). Our technical ability to detect low-level radiation far surpasses our understanding of its health consequences. If you have a granite kitchen counter, IT is radioactive from trace quantities of uranium and its daughter elements.
-- Vernon, Jul 10 2015


Duck, even if technically this would not work I am very much liking the angle you take.
-- bungston, Jul 11 2015


There is no reason why the beams of radiation cannot be delivered while the person's affected parts are held immobilised, but the rest of them is bathed in warm moving sand.
-- xenzag, Jul 11 2015



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