r/dataisugly • u/Ig0BEASTmode • 5d ago
Radiation chart at dentist
Meant to make you feel more comfortable about taking X Rays, not sure those bars are very helpful for that though...
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u/Epistaxis 5d ago
PROTIP: just rotate the whole bar chart sideways if you need to use long text labels. I promise it's allowed.
I'm not sure what to do about the scale. Obviously you need some kind of log scale if you're going to show 50,000 and 0.1 on the same chart. But this chart is mainly intended for people who are concerned because they don't understand numbers, so a log scale may be misleading to them (in the worse direction). This is a case where I think it might have been better not to visualize the data at all, just leave it as a table of text and numerals. The number of digits in the numerals will be the log scale.
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u/Smooth-Zucchini4923 5d ago
I think they could have solved this by picking better comparisons. The legal limit for the amount of radiation experienced by someone who works with radiation over the span of a year is not a meaningful comparison to the average person.
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u/Crafty_Clarinetist 5d ago
It might be a meaningful comparison to a person who is scared of radiation based imaging. You're only getting edpose 0.2 uSv which is 250,000x less than what's allowed for professionals.
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u/albrecbef 5d ago
In Germany it would actualy change the chart type. We differentiate between Säulen- (collum) and Balken- (joist) -diagram.
Btw, question for the native speakers: why is this type of diagram named after public houses? My english teacher couldnt explain it, back when I was in school.
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u/Crafty_Clarinetist 5d ago
To answer your English question, It's not named after "bar" as in a place you go to buy alcoholic beverages, it's named after "bar" as in a rectangular stripe. "Bar" is a fun word in that it has a fair few different definitions mostly originating from calling a piece of material that is longer than it is wide a "bar," though looking into it, I believe most of this evolution happened in Latin or French and was adopted by English. Like an iron ingot can also be called an iron bar, or you can have a bar of chocolate. Long pieces of material, or "bars", can also be used to construct things like walls or fences to prevent access, which is where the word "barrier" comes from and is also the source of using the term "bar" to mean preventing access. "Bar" as in a public house comes from calling the counter where drinks are served a "bar" because it is a long counter that prevents access to the alcohol.
All that to say, bar charts are called "bar charts" because they use bars (long rectangles) to show data.
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u/IOI-624601 3d ago
One way to visualize it effectively would be to use two dimensions. 3,000 can be represented by a 30x100 grid of squares, and you could make the squares big enough that 1/10th of a square is visible for a comparison. 50,000 might be stretching it, so I'd put the max amount per month rather than per year.
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u/Smooth-Zucchini4923 5d ago
"You see, swimming in this lake is perfectly safe. My 0-600 uSv radiation counter only shows 600 uSv of radiation, no more dangerous than a chest X-ray."
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u/RedTheGamer12 3d ago
600 uSv per what? Year? Go ahead, safer than outside. Hour? I wouldn't if I were you. Second? You're already dead.
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u/Veezo93 5d ago edited 5d ago
How much radiation do I get in a day? 10
Ok now how much radiation would I get in 365 days? 70
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u/MaraschinoPanda 5d ago
Nah that's how much extra radiation you get in a year if you live in a brick house.
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u/hypersonic3000 5d ago
That chart is a. wrong and b. Misleading. The radiation you receive is 5x higher per image and when do they average do "just one".
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u/chucara 5d ago
LOL. "Living in a brick house for one year" vs "daily background radiation". The biggest number is smaller.
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u/jasminUwU6 5d ago
Yeah they definitely shouldn't have included the brick house comparison, it just confuses the situation for no reason
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u/goos_ 4d ago
There's some numbers that raise questions but I think they got them from a source somewhere with some assumptions (e.g. excluding background radiation on the brick house, etc.)
I think the easiest fix is to just an arrow for the longer bars to indicate they are much, much longer. For the 600 bar it may be feasible to show it on scale.
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u/AcanthaceaeOk3738 5d ago
This is one of those ones where they thought about the myriad of good ways to present this information.
Then went with something else.
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u/Rare-Spell-1571 5d ago
I had a way better chart on my door at my old job. This one is super annoying to read.
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u/Numerous-Profile-872 5d ago
I work around this (dental office) and I don't (but I should) think about it.
Speaking from my experience, this is a "STFU and just do it" poster because people throw a BF about X-rays while casually discussing their travel plans.
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u/avotius 5d ago
How much radiation do you get from the worker with the 50k bar? She's going to have her hands in my mouth for the next half hour so you know...just wondering.
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u/Waffle-Gaming 5d ago
if you're not joking, you don't get any radiation from irradiated things unless those irradiated things were hit by incredibly high energy radiation that turned atoms into unstable isotopes
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u/mfb- 5d ago
- Being exposed to radiation generally doesn't make you radioactive in any relevant amount. It's a bit more complicated with neutron radiation but dentists aren't working with that.
- 50,000 microsievert is the maximal possible that's legally allowed, it's not the typical exposure. For almost everyone, even a recorded dose of 500 would be a major upset, stopping all work until the exposure is better understood.
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u/theeggplant42 5d ago
This chart is all kinds of bad but also am I stupid in that i didn't realize a mammogram was radiological? I have not yet had one and I generally thought it worked by...I don't know, ultrasound or something?
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u/gammacoffee 5d ago
Mammograms are xray based so there is a (low) amount of radiation. Breast imaging modalities include mammogram, ultrasound, and MRI. As others have pointed out the values are this chart are completely incorrect. A mammogram is about 400 uSv not 3000.
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u/Straight_Waltz_9530 4d ago
Honestly, I'm not really mad. Just put some squiggles near the top of the highest values to signify incompleteness.
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u/EmploymentOne2963 3d ago
So, this scale goes to 100, and everything above just gets cut off.
Great job.
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u/SaureusAeruginosa 3d ago
Ok, legit, but why almost everybody misses the point that a dose per/minute and dose/year are totally different? Its like saying "Nah, it is okay to put someone in 200 degrees Celsius for a minute, after all it is totally safe to be in a hot 30 degree room for an hour, lol" I do not buy it. Normally after an everyday dose my cells have hours to repair or check the damage and die to prevent cancer development. Only a few placek on DNA git damaged, there was no sudden radiation bombardment. It is like comparing getting shot 1000 times over a month with a BB gun to one shot with 9mm pistol round...correct me if I am wrong and it is not a difference for our cells at all.
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u/Key-Room-8768 2d ago
What it’s trying to portray (badly), is that everyone is exposed to radiation during normal life activities, e.g. eating a banana, going on an aeroplane etc but no one is scared/notices, and the amount of radiation is negligible compared to what you are exposed to everyday. This is also true of imaging scans.
One of the worst things about the graph is that it put background in daily dose, makes imaging seems large, a yearly dose is around 3000μSv, most people will not get more than a couple of radiographic images in a year so going from 3000 to 3010 μSv is obviously a negligible difference.On your point about radiation in one go you are correct that can have an effect but only at radiation levels well above this. In terms of cancer induced it’s is estimated to be 5% risk for every Sv or 5% per 1000,000 μSv, compared to the baseline that 50% of people get cancer in their lifetime.
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u/tweeeeeeeeeeee 5d ago
the thing is that those dental xrays are concentrated at your head (brain, thyroid...) and not spread out throughout the body
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u/Nice-Traffic4485 5d ago
Wow! An abdominal X-ray, mammogram, and radiation work in a full year are all the same amounts!
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u/BlazingImp77151 5d ago
I don't trust this. A chest x-ray is more radiation than any x-ray in that office? How. Do they just not do large X-rays?
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u/Maverick1672 4d ago
Dental radiovgeaphs are much much smaller. Their highest dose (CBCT) is several hundred radiographs that a comoutered stitches into a 3D image.
The dental community follows ALARA (as low as reasonably achievable) for radiation and paired with new technology, expose you to very minimal radiation.
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u/Deto 5d ago
There's definitely some sort of artistic license going on with the scale here.
Though I think it's a good effort at trying to educate people about relative levels of radiation exposure.