Pratik Samant

Congratulations to Daniel McGowan on receiving the NHS South East Healthcare Science Award for Educational Leadership🏆👨‍🏫

This award is in recognition of Dan's NHS education work & for developing the MSc in Medical Physics w/ Radiobiology programme

@medsci.ox.ac.uk @ox.ac.uk @ouhospitals.bsky.social

The administration is a perfect storm of dumb people who enjoy inflicting pain and are addicted to psychotic cruelty and quadrupling down. It ends in total ruin if you don't impeach him.

first of all, some housekeeping. you may be seeing mentions of "RN" thinking it's referring to RedNote, a tiktok competitor. this is incorrect—RN stands for ReNner, as in the Jeremy Renner app

🧪Cancer fact of the day:

Carcinogenesis induced by space radiation: A systematic review The carcinogenic risk from space radiation has always been a health risk issue of great concern during space exploration. In recent years, a large number of cellular and animal experiments have demons...

🧪Cancer fact of the day: Astronauts are at higher risk for cancer because of increased exposure to cosmic radiation in space. NASA sets the acceptable level of cancer risk from space radiation as a 3% fatal cancer risk at the upper 95% confidence interval. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

The expendables: Bioarchaeological evidence for pauper apprentices in 19th century England and the health consequences of child labour Child labour is the most common form of child abuse in the world today, with almost half of child workers employed in hazardous industries. The large-scale employment of children during the rapid indu...

"Their struggles and their deprivation are written on their skeletons." 🏺

If you'd like to read an archaeology article that will rip your heart out and radicalise you, read this. Skip to the discussion/conclusions if graphs aren't your thing:

journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

🧪Cancer fact of the day: A single organism, Helicobacter pylori, is responsible for 90% of gastric cancers! H pylori has infected about 2/3 of the world's population, but is usually asymptomatic.
wwwnc.cdc.gov/travel/yello...

Interaction between tobacco and alcohol use and the risk of head and neck cancer: pooled analysis in the International Head and Neck Cancer Epidemiology Consortium - PubMed Our results confirm that the joint effect between tobacco and alcohol use is greater than multiplicative on head and neck cancer risk. However, a substantial proportion of head and neck cancers cannot...

🧪Cancer fact of the day: Drinking alcohol combined with smoking increases the risk of head and neck cancers by much more than either habit alone. The synergistic effect to increase cancer risk is more than multiplicative! pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19190158/

🧪Cancer fact of the day: In the UK, roughly half of people will get cancer in their lifetime. www.nhs.uk/conditions/c...

just repeating the phrase "hawk tuah girl meme coin" over and over until my brain is as smooth as a polished stone

How Old Is Cancer? At Least as Old as the Start of the Dinosaurs, Fossil Shows | HISTORY A malignant tumor found in a 240 million‑year‑old turtle bone shows that cancer has been plaguing living things since the Triassic Period.

🧪Cancer fact of the day: Cancer is at least as old as the dinosaurs, and likely even older.
www.history.com/news/oldest-...

South Korea rn is what it looks like when people see democracy as a fragile thing that needs to be defended by all means necessary, and not as their inevitable birthright as citizens of an exceptional nation

The leaden box and the gram of radium - Google Arts & Culture Google Arts & Culture features content from over 2000 leading museums and archives who have partnered with the Google Cultural Institute to bring the world's treasures online.

artsandculture.google.com/story/the-le...

Cancer fact of the day 🧪: early radiotherapy largely relied on one element, radium. The metal was therefore extremely valuable and needed to be kept in vaults. One gram of radium used to cost ~£1.6 million in today's currency, which is more than its weight in diamonds!

How have literal billionaires convinced so many Americans that the people picking their strawberries are the villains

Peto's paradox cannot be explained away by lifestyle choices because it is observed across multiple species (including non humans, who don't really make lifestyle choices). It is a cellular phenomenon.

🧪Cancer fact of the day: Peto's paradox has led scientists to explore if humans can suppress cancers as effectively as larger mammals do. Elephant cells are more vigilant for cancer than ours, and take potential mutational threats more seriously.
news.cancerresearchuk.org/2023/08/12/c...

🧪Cancer fact of the day: Radiotherapy does one better than this, by modulating delivered dose in 3D. Cancer cells are already more vulnerable to radiation, and on top of that we give them more radiation dose than healthy tissue. This minimizes side effects as best as possible.

while "open borders UK" is in the news: here's someone caught by the minimum income requirement increase from £18k to £29k, and now has to crowdfund 17 grand for the savings route so their spouse isn't kicked out of the country

www.oncology.ox.ac.uk/team/pratik-... @physgal.bsky.social Hoping that uni url counts as evidence in that case to be added ! :)

For the first time in a while overdose deaths are declining - seven straight months of declines. The cause is complicated but appears to be the culmination of a number of different Biden admin policy initiatives coming to fruition. And yet it meant absolutely nothing politically.

🧪Cancer fact of the day: Radiation dose delivery at this level of precision doesn't happen all by itself!
Engineers and physicists perform regular quality checks and corrections on every radiotherapy machine. This is one of the primary duties of radiotherapy physicists in the hospital.

This is why I got into science in the first place

🧪Cancer fact of the day: modern radiotherapy is less like a blunt instrument, and more like a precision strike. For example, stereotactic radiosurgery can treat tumours as small as 0.7-1cm in diameter (about as large as a grain of rice), while having the dose reduce by 20 fold just 1.5cm away!

That being said, there is a very very small (less than 1%) chance that radiotherapy can cause a second cancer.

This is far less than the probability of controlling the tumour however, and...well...our patients already *have* cancer, so the risk/benefit is pretty good.

DNA damage (double strand breakage to be specific) to cancer cells is typically fatal. They need DNA to keep dividing. Without it they will either die or be unable to replicate (which is just as good).

Incredible how the narrative changes as soon as the election is over

I wish I could like this more than once. Well done on getting through what must have been a long month. Good luck for those ahead, and I'm glad to hear that the benefits are so far outweighing side effects.

I'm very sorry to hear that, it is a brutal and relentless disease. I hope his new medication worked better ❤️