Watching a TV show where the characters were exposed to major radiation. One cop hands the other a green pill and he says, “What’s this?” She says, “They’re to counteract the radiation poisoning.”
Do such pills actually exist? I was under the impression there was no antidote to radiation poisoning… if you got it, you were pretty much screwed. How realistic was that scenario?
AFAIK, the only “antidote” for radiation poisoning is iodine pills, and those only help if you’ve ingested radioactive iodine in fallout or contaminated food. Flooding the body with non-radioactive iodine helps flush the radioactive iodine out and prevent thyroid cancer. Other than that all that can be done is palliative treatment for the symptoms of radiation exposure.
I had heard that taking a massive dose of iodine (e.g. in iodized salt) would cause your thyroid to grab the non-radioactive iodine first. This would keep it from grabbing other less-friendly isotopes, but I don’t know how true that is, and I thought the point was that you needed to take the pills before exposure in order to be protected. The expression “fill your pockets with salt” keeps jangling in my head but I can’t remember where I heard it, or why someone would put the salt in their pockets rather than just ingest it ASAP upon exposure.
Radaway of course. 
A bit of Googlingindicates that there might be a bit more you can do. Neupogen apparently stimulates the production of white blood cells (usually decimated by radiation exposure), “DTPA” actually binds to many radioactive elements so your kidneys can filter them, while Prussian Blue works similarly in the intestines.
Radaway always struck me as a bit skeevy, what with the big needle on the end, and the fact that it was always decades old and found in a locker in a leper colony. 
I’ve heard wondrous things about alcohol in general and wine specifically, but this might be a few decades out of date. What’s the straight dope?
To add to what AndrewL said … potassium iodide is the form of iodine that is used.
Be sure to use your Geiger counter first. If it’s just a couple of rads, you can wait it out. And, if you’re a Vault Citizen who’s received Vault City Medical Training, it’s better to see Dr. What’shisface, and get treeted, so you can ask for the Inoculation.
Sorry, sometimes my game geek just has to come out and play.
Worth noting that these two drugs (neither of which are pills - they have to be given by injection or infusion) are for two different situations. Neupogen is for an external exposure to a v large dose of gamma or x-rays (or neutrons); DTPA is used where certain heavy elements have been ingested. In the first case you are trying to restore the damaged immune system, in the second you are trying to get the radioactive material out of the body before it does too much damage.
Potassium iodate tablets could be of use following a reactor accident where a release of radioactive iodine is likely. In the UK all the nuclear emergency plans for the various power stations include the issue of Stable Iodine to the public - particularly to children who are at the greatest risk of later developing thyroid cancer.
Sorry to tell the OP that there is no magic pill for “radiation poisoning” but, then again, exposure to radiation is not necessarily some dreadful death sentence. Humans can actually recover from exposure to pretty large doses and at least it is easy to detect radiation and radioactive material (witness the polonium 210 trail around London and back to Russia). I worry more about chemical and biological hazards that are a bugger to detect in time!
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