Scott Alexander’s article on altruistic kidney donation weighed the initial CT scan as a heavy negative, like an incremental 1 in 650 risk of death. Shocking to me at the time, but the number seemed to check out, at least as a first order estimate.
Yuck, I have recurrent kidney stones and have had many CT-scans. It seems to have become the standard procedure when you complain of abdominal pain at the ER. Years ago I remember just getting an X-ray.
What's interesting is I needed surgery to remove the most recent stones, and I've not had a CT-scan since- the urologist uses ultrasound.
On the other hand, I've had fluoroscopy.. probably worse than even CT-scans.
The comments on that article heavily criticized that portion. I don't know jack about the topic, but it really did seem like just Scott's envelope-math against the sentiment of the entire field: "this is not enough radiation to matter".
