I’m teaching a “physics for pre-meds” course this semester, and we’re going to be talking about radiation soon. Since this is a pre-med course, I want to talk about the differences between activity, absorbed dose, equivalent dose, effective dose, etc. But the stuff I’ve found online seems to be inconsistent with what’s in the textbook. The textbook reads, in part,
My question is mainly about terminology. If you look at the Wikipedia pages on equivalent dose and effective dose, it seems like that quantity that the textbook is calling “effective dose” is what Wiki calls the “equivalent dose”. What Wiki calls the “effective dose” seems to have something to do with the fact that different organs are more or less likely to develop cancer after a given dose in seivert.
Is the textbook closer to the accepted terminology, or is Wiki? Has terminology changed in the last couple of years or something? (The current edition of the text is from 2005, but the first edition is from 1980 and for all I know this verbiage has been in the textbook from the beginning.) I’m perfectly willing to believe that this textbook got it wrong, but I want to make sure of it before I tell the students this.