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  3. Less than two months into her breast cancer treatment, Alexandra Jn-Charles

Less than two months into her breast cancer treatment, Alexandra Jn-Charles

游客2024-04-20  17
问题     Less than two months into her breast cancer treatment, Alexandra Jn-Charles was called into a new room at SUNY Downstate Medical Center, where two treating physicians, the chief medical officer and an attorney representing the hospital told her that mistakes had been made.
    The skin lesions (病变) on her chest, they said, had been caused not by her illness but by the machine that was supposed to cure her. The 32-year-old had received nearly 30 radiotherapy sessions, but at this point it didn’t really make sense to count them, because a programming error had caused each installment to deliver at least three times the prescribed amount of radiation.
    Jn-Charles, who died two and a half years after this meeting in 2005, would eventually come to exemplify the emergence of accidental over-radiation in U.S. hospitals. The worst off have reported skin damage, inexplicable hair loss and ribs (肋骨) buckling beneath their chests — debilitating injuries suffered while undergoing screening or treatment for something that would otherwise kill them. A steep price for survival.
    These tragedies go to the core of an issue as pressing as it is uncomfortable to think about: Have advances in technology, improved treatment methods and more comprehensive screening protocols led to systematic, excessive irradiation of patients?
    The answer, according to a growing number of health experts, is yes. For example, the CT scan, which has become commonplace in response to rising cancer rates, is itself thought to increase the likelihood that a person develops cancer. The scans deliver several hundred times more radiation than an X-ray — even when guidelines and dosages are followed precisely. "What we do as physicians arguably harms people," James Ehrlich, a clinical associate professor at the University of Colorado and an adviser for Premier Micronutrient Corp., told Newsweek.
    A jarring example of that came in 2010, when Walt Bogdanich published an extensive review in The New York Times that listed numerous patients whose lives had been destroyed by mistakes in hospital imaging and radiotherapy. Shortly after the article series went to press, the Food and Drug Administration began to ramp up its efforts to limit excessive exposure, eventually launching its Initiative to Reduce Unnecessary Radiation Exposure from Medical Imaging.
    Along with organizations like the American College of Radiology, the FDA now supports a number of so-called dose registries that allow facilities to compare radiation dose indexes to regional and national values. To date, hundreds of facilities across the U.S. have enrolled.
    But the FDA’s regulatory authority is generally focused on equipment manufacturers, and compliance on the state level is never guaranteed. And even compliant facilities run the risk of over-radiating patients: A 2012 paper by the Institute of Medicine found that medical imaging is one of the leading environmental causes of breast cancer. [br] What does the author want to explain by exemplifying Jn-Charles?
选项 A、There is no need to waste so much money to treat breast cancer.
B、Until now, breast cancer is still an incurable illness around the world.
C、There is an increasing number of young people suffering from cancer.
D、There are incidents of excessive irradiation of patients in America.
答案 D
解析 第3段首句指出，在2005年的这次会议后，珍妮．查尔斯只活了两年半便去世了，她可能就是美国医院出现意外过度辐射的例证。由此可见，作者列举珍妮.查尔斯的例子就是为了引出本文所要探讨的过度放射问题。故D)符合题意，为答案。A)是利用该段末句设置的干扰项，文中所说的是为了治愈癌症却要冒送命的风险，这是一种昂贵的生存代价，而不是说没有必要花那么多钱去治疗癌症，故A)不符合文意，予以排除。B)和C)在原文中没有提及，都可以排除。
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