Fluoroscopy is a moving-picture X-ray. Developed in the late 1800s, it has valid medical applications to this day. Using it to fit shoes began in the 1920s, when the risks of ionizing radiation were not well understood.

You and a salesperson peer into viewing ports to watch your bones moving in the shoe as you wiggled your toes! Very occasional use was probably not too awful, but radiation damage is cumulative, so frequent use was another story. Salespeople had cumulative exposure risk from proximity to poorly shielded devices. One salesperson rad injury required an amputation. They were fascinating to use, and children would do it just for fun.

US scientific orgs such as ACXRP issued warnings as early as 1931. Pennsylvania banned them in '57, and Switzerland in '59. By '70 they were mostly gone from the US, Canada, and Europe. A few hung around into the early '80s, illegally or inadvertently.

A 1938 unit at the US National Museum of Health and Medicine.

Shoe Fluoroscope

Most of the alleged photos I found of people using one failed an AI checker. The photo below passed, but... it's getting harder to know for sure. I'm tryin' here!

Fluoroscope in use

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[–] [S] 14 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I would guess these were not only worse, but way worse!

The units varied widely, but the US & Canada models averaged 0.13 Sv per 20 second use. That was to the user though. Less per use to the attendant, but they could be exposed many times per day, so more in total.

Not sure about radiology, but the web thinks the US DOE's occupational limit for an adult is 2 mSv/yr averaged over 5 years with no more than 5 mSv in any given year. So a single use of the machine would dump about 65 times the stochastic risk into somebody's foot as you'd get if you ran right up against the maximum 5 year average DOE acceptable limit.

I imagine you have seen the XKCD chart.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 child)

    So in summary (yearly doses):

    • 0.1 Sv: onset of cancer
    • 0.4 Sv: onset of radiation poisoning
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  • [–] [S] 5 points 1 day ago

    Please forgive me if there's a joke flying over my head (happens a lot!), but that doesn't seem right. A sievert is a unit of statistical risk, so it changes the odds of cancer, but short of extreme doses, it's statistical. Both the total dose, and the rate in Sv/year matters, with higher rates being worse.

    A little over a year on the ISS will get you around 0.1 Sv, but the cancer risk of that is still extremely low. Lots of people have done far more than 1 yr in space, and they aren't dropping like flies. If 0.1 Sv was a major cancer risk, the DOE limit would be far less than 0.05 Sv/yr.

    Also it would imply more than half the people who used these machines one time would've had a causal, not an incidental, cancer, since the short time window of the unit is the worst case way to get the exposure.

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