When X-Rays were used at the Shoe Store
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
There's a good history of them in Plucked: A History of Hair Removal. https://books.google.com/books?id=LZvsCwAAQBAJ&printsec=fron...
Atomic bombs also pretty much put an end to world wars.
World War I saw the advent of chemical warfare with mustard gas. World War II saw European cities razed by carpet-bombing, even leaving atoms aside.
One of the earliest inventions that completely changed warfare at the start of World War I was the machine gun, which saw its first large-scale use in the 1914 German campaign against Belgian forts. Machine guns had been used in the Russo-Japanese War, but not to this extent and not with such terrible efficiency. Dan Carlin covers this topic in great detail in his fascinating 23h+ podcast series "Blueprint for Armageddon".
(I'm in the UK)
EDIT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoe-fitting_fluoroscope#Regul...
Looks possible.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-32738088#_=_
Not sure if these actually used X-rays but it'd be interesting to find out if they did.
EDIT: In hindsight, I really don't think the type I remember used X-rays.
ANOTHER EDIT: Looks like this is the company that made the ones I can remember: http://sensatech.com/applications/index.html
I’d stand on the thing, stick the fronts of my shoes into the two holes, lean over and look through the viewport (which was rather like an old stereopticon), push the button and wiggle my green toes.
The clerks never bothered me. I think I knew enough to keep the time short. I don’t remember if it had a timeout - it probably did.
Hard to prove the causation decades later, but that was the working assumption.
I wasn't old enough to understand the dangers, and of course most parents didn't understand them either.
It was all rather insane and reckless, and only luck rather than judgement kept them from becoming a major public health issue.
I'm middle aged and remember Clarks (probably in Sheffield, UK) having what looked like a crushing machine with steel plates that closed - very gently - on to the feet and gave a read out of size and width. (See image at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-32738088#_=_ under "Appropriate measures", left hand machine seems familiar to me).
I remember it being a very strange but pleasant experience and wonder now if it wasn't my first ASMR.
I am not your father.
"Its radioactive radiation increases the defenses of teeth and gums. The cells are loaded with new life energy, the bacteria are hindered in their destroying effect. "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doramad_Radioactive_Toothpaste https://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/quackcures/toothpaste.ht...
As a side note, many of his fellow radiologists lost fingers because they didn't follow procedures using shields and lead gloves.
> That 1948 study of 43 machines in Detroit showed ranges from 16 to 75 roentgens per minute. In 1946, the American Standards Association had issued a safety code for industrial use of X-rays, limiting exposure to 0.1 R per day.
I'd be curious how much a typical modern dental x-ray emits, but we no longer measure in roentgens these days as we have better measures of the actual dose (sieverts).
https://www.iaea.org/resources/rpop/health-professionals/den...
Less negligible are CT scans, which can expose you to multiples of the average annual background dose in a few minutes.
That's still relatively low level exposure. But there isn't really a safe minimum exposure level, and it's certainly not something you'd want to have regularly.
That's 2 years (CT) and 10 days (x-ray) of exposure to sea level background radiation respectively.
Many lost feet or parts of them, never making a connection back to the fluoroscope. Nobody knew how much radiation those things were actually putting out.
(Ironically or not, I now work in medical physics where even the slightest exposure gets noted and tracked)
That was post WWII, so I don't know how long it'd been there. The fluoroscope I mean; the shoe store had been there for decades.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/image/MzcwNzM3OQ.jpeg
Was cheaper than being imaged today with one of these:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0a/Xr...
Because the first one was a hack put together before we knew how bad it was. The second one is a high quality unit, with high safety standards, and regulatory compliance. The first one has none of those features.
You may as well ask yourself why a 737 costs more than the Wright Flyer.
All developed countries share the aforementioned facility, personnel, regulatory, and equipment costs that differentiate modern medicine from mid-20th-century shoe stores.
Even developing countries perform medical imaging to higher standards than the circumstances detailed in the article.
The views taken are done to show particular things and the person doing it needs training. Then the reporting needs paying for, and radiologists aren’t cheap. The images and paperwork (referral, report, images, billing and demographics) need storing and need to have a system for finding them again.
The department needs things for cleaning your blood off the floor, handling you trying to die while on site and generally working safely.
And lastly, everyone clips the ticket, insurance primarily.
But I mostly like your take, it’s great.
Considering the $2k cost and roughly 5 million cars sold each year, the safety measures cost $10 billion, for an ROI of up to $30 billion/year.
There was an unfortunate uptick as smart phones gained popularity, though it seems like public awareness campaigns and distracted driving laws may have helped that.
Car safety is a pretty good example of how both government regulation and the free market can work together to achieve positive results. (marketing based on safety features allowed companies to compete on something other than price).
That's not an endorsement to embrace all government regulation, just an example of how it isn't all meaningless bureaucracy.
[0] https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
Whatever you want to call the part of the economy that functions in part on competition between businesses, that competition has played a part in car safety. When businesses are marketing safety features, they are competing on safety features rather than (just) price or other factors. Those are market forces, whether or not they meet a specific definition of free market.
Or do you take issue with me saying there is a concept of a "free market" and another concept of a "(not pure) free market"? Honestly I don't know because you haven't taken the time explain your point of view before resorting to personal attacks, and calling someone a liar or irrational because they use a term more loosely than you'd prefer is an excellent way to shut down productive conversation. You have taken that path, so I won't bother to converse further unless you're willing to back off the flame-war rhetoric and explain your point of view without insults. If don't want to take the time for that, that's fine, I'm not entitled to your detailed explanations, in which case I wish you well, and ask you simply not to respond if that response will consist of insults.
It is quite plausible that we will discover new things that are dangerous in the future (to varying degrees), as we once did with x-rays.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but mainstream science doesn’t really follow the same pattern of “bad for you but ok on small doses” (historically the most dangerous viewpoint to have) for mm-waves.
My point is more that it's a urban myth that we thought X-Rays were harmless in the 50's. We just had a bad understanding of the risk vectors & built a bad risk model.
"OK in small doses" is pretty much word for word[1][2][3] the viewpoint (that you call "the most dangerous viewpoint") offered for both mm waves and the old backscatter x-rays, which are still in use on mobile trucks and in prisons.
[1]"The radiation exposure is extremely small" https://www.health.harvard.edu/diseases-and-conditions/are-f...
[2]"the energy emitted by millimeter wave technology is 1,000 times less than the international limits and guidelines." https://www.tsa.gov/news/press/releases/2017/06/08/tsa-compl...
[3]"negligible individual dose" https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/is-that-ai...
First - Yes backscatter x-Rays are bad - we agree on that. Don't confuse those with mm-waves. My parent comment is literally about how X-Rays are bad, so no conflict there.
Second - High Energy mm-waves are bad for health (in the same way extremely bight light can be bad for your eyes). HOWEVER, as far as I can tell, none of those sources say prolonged exposure to low energy mm waves (like the kind in scanners) is bad. THAT's a big difference. Prolonged exposure to low-level X-rays is very bad. The same is not true for mm-waves (again, unless you have a source that says that).
Apparently Mr. Byers the maker and an avid drinker of the cola had to be buried in a lead-lined coffin. According to The New York Times [3], Mr. Byers' death triggered action from the FDA and brought an end to radioactive patent medicines.
From the CNN article:
Evans was an expert at measuring and mathematically modeling the human body's uptake and excretion of radioactivity. Based on Byers' self-reported RadiThor consumption, Evans' model had predicted that Byers' body would contain about 100,000 becquerel of radioactivity. ("Becquerel" is an international unit of radioactivity.) What he found was that Byers' skeletal remains actually had a total of 225,000 becquerel, suggesting that either Evans' model of radiation uptake was underestimating radium's affinity for bone, or alternatively, that Byers had actually understated his personal RadiThor consumption by a factor of at least two. It was not possible to determine which alternative accounted for the discrepancy.
For the sake of comparison, some water from the Fukushima disaster reads 200,000 becquerel, although different isotopes are involved and exposure limits vary by isotope, Mr. Byers was well beyond a reasonable limit by any measure. [4]
[1] http://lateralscience.blogspot.com/2017/12/the-radium-water-...
[2] https://www.cnn.com/2016/11/10/health/energy-drinks-radioact...
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/1932/04/02/archives/death-stirs-acti...
[4] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/water-6-700-times-more-ra...
Then suddendly xray was considered harmful and you would only get on static image when you had serious problems.
Actually that seems like a good idea. Should I patent it?
I'd pay a premium for hiking boots custom made for my feet, and I bet a lot of other people would, too. Or any athletic footwear. People are already paying whatever they can afford.
Of course you can get custom hiking boots handmade, but when I looked into it, the materials and design were ancient and the resulting boots were ridiculously heavy.
And while this particular idea had its flaws, the idea of looking at a foot inside a shoe is fundamentally a good one in my opinion. Feet are pretty variable between people and the difference between having the right shoe and the wrong shoe is a good differentiator. I didn't appreciate how much until I got a pair of hiking boots (Asolo) that actually fit my particularly shaped foot. My father-in-law had custom shoes made for him on Hong Kong in the 60's and would send them a check when ever he wanted a new pair.
So startup idea is to use some sort of nuclear imaging technology that has no negative health effects to enhance shoe fitting and thus sales.
Maybe for what you want to see on the shoes you could use an even lower dose than the new dental x-rays. I mean, these old shoe store x-rays were trying to make the image directly visible to human eyes with a fluoroscope or something, right? Isn't that going to be orders of magnitude more radiation than modern sensors that aren't using the energy from the x-ray radiation to actually render the image?
From the same source, a 4,000-km cross-country flight is 40 µSv. We allow airline workers and other business travellers to rack up a couple of hundred of those a year without worrying too much, so it should be safe to try on at least dozens of pairs of shoes per year.
In practice, we'd surely demand too much regulatory burden for this tech to ever make it back to shoe stores. If shoe salesmen have to be as qualified, regulated and insured as radiologists, it would be cheaper to make custom shoes.
It's a shame, really. I was thinking about these machines recently as I was trying to come up with a method to drill through a soft and opaque material -- how would you know you were properly centered? Gosh, one of these would be handy.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/76/0f/ac/760fac925593ed258c93...
I feel like shoes are kind of like mattresses are marketed the same way - mostly talking about pressure points, that and memory foam.
As someone who has had only one professional running shoe fitting in my life, I found it invaluable. They were able to immediately identify where my stride was going wrong. They advised me not just on the shoe, but on improving my gait. I bought one full-price shoe once, then was able to buy similar shoes on sale/clearance. Following the fitting (and guidance), I've not had the same knee pain since.
YMMV, but it's not all cons. It's a middle-ground between nothing and a full-fledged sports therapy.
It was an unmitigated disaster. So I went to a different podiatrist. She said "let me guess, you went to Dr. So-and-so?" and I replied yes, she said "Yeah, I don't agree with him. Shoes are modern, but so are floors."
My feet are much happier now. Properly designed insoles make pretty much any shoe comfortable for me (notably, the insoles aren't really padded, they're pretty hard). Walking around on hardwood floors barefoot makes my feet hurt.
Sure, running barefoot through a well-maintained soccer field is going to be lower impact than running on pavement. But ancient humans didn’t evolve on soccer fields.
If you ever try running through unmaintained land barefoot, it’s terrible on your feet! Uneven terrain, branches and rocks everywhere... you wind up putting a ton of stress on your feet, far more than you do walking around a house barefoot.
I think it’s far more likely that a) modern life causes children not to develop strong feet from an early age, or b) that evolutionary pressures for well-functioning feet have disappeared.
In any case, I’m glad the insoles solved your problems. I just wish the field of podiatry did a better job of root cause analysis.
As it is, a constant flat hardess, coupled with shoes, only serves to constrain the foot and work singular positions.
I know if I'm on foot standing all day in the workshop (concrete floor) my feet hurt a lot more than if I'm out walking on the street for the same sort of duration.
That said, shoes have been found to go back 40,000 years at least
I bought these balloon pods for standing on [1]. They create an unstable surface which your feet and ankle muscles must overcome. Its incredibly challenging. Adding in exercises like squats or med ball twists really make you work. You can feel the muscles in your feet and ankles working!
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Yes4All-Balance-Pods-Hedgehog-Hand/dp...
I wish more doctors did more root cause in most fields.
My understanding (IANAP) is that the problem is not the hard part, it's the flat part.
You can often tell if someone exclusively heel strikes and doesn't stand or walk or run on their toes at all because they will have super thin calves. You can see it in some people in how they place their foot on bike pedals too, toe runners pedal with their toes, exclusive heel strikers pedal much closer to their heel.