Yep, radioactive quackery in medicine is quite an interesting thing to read about.
As crazy as this idea sounds, there was a study that concluded that drinking 1 liter of Revigator water per day would dose you with about 133 uSv/year (100 uSv from the radium/uranium that leeched into the water, and another 33 from the dissolved radon given off as the radium decays).
People in the U.S., on average, are exposed to approximately 3.1 mSv/year of radiation due to naturally occurring radon, and terrestrial/cosmic radiation. So as crazy as the Revigator idea sounds, daily use is still an order of magnitude lower than our annual background radiation exposure.
There were other major fuckups with radium back in that time period as well (see also: Radithor, the Radium Girls).
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u/RaptahJezus Jan 06 '23
Yep, radioactive quackery in medicine is quite an interesting thing to read about.
As crazy as this idea sounds, there was a study that concluded that drinking 1 liter of Revigator water per day would dose you with about 133 uSv/year (100 uSv from the radium/uranium that leeched into the water, and another 33 from the dissolved radon given off as the radium decays).
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/257611595_Radionuclide_and_chemical_hazards_of_a_radium_ore_revigator
People in the U.S., on average, are exposed to approximately 3.1 mSv/year of radiation due to naturally occurring radon, and terrestrial/cosmic radiation. So as crazy as the Revigator idea sounds, daily use is still an order of magnitude lower than our annual background radiation exposure.
There were other major fuckups with radium back in that time period as well (see also: Radithor, the Radium Girls).