Were those old shoe store fluoroscopes a health hazard?
Referring to Cecil’s column above, it seems that back a little before my time, it was common to have an X-ray device in a shoe store. What, pray tell, was the purpose of such a device in the 1950’s shoe store setting?
Other, of course, than to cause employers and customers to eventually die a painful death?
Cecil said it was a gimmick. I am guessing that it was probably to aid parents and get kids in for the “cool, x-rays!” factor. I know that I would have LIVED at the shoe store when I was a kid if it had x-rays. 
As for the parents, I remember telling my mother that a shoe fit because I liked it, not because it fit. I also remember complaining about shoes that I didn’t like fitting. Since all of these had 2 or 3 viewports, I think a parent could see for themselves if the shoe fit.
The idea is that you would try on a pair of shoes, then take an x-ray look at how well they fit your toes; a complete gimmick, but very much characteristic of the kind of optmistic science/futurism of that era - once you’d bought the shoes, you’d just hop in your atomic-powered flying car and zoom back to your robot-staffed house to enjoy dinner in the automatic kitchen of tomorrow.
I’m still waiting for those days… 
There was some legitimacy to the idea. Many “kewl” shoe designs over the centuries have done untold damage to feet, and the flouroscopes probably did discourage some stupid fashions.
I vaguely remember the one in the Penney’s where we shopped. I rememer not being tall enough to see in the viewer to see my own feet, I got to see my aunt’s feet instead.
If memory serves, it was actually worse than a static x-ray, it more like floroscopy, which is real time x-ray and uses a lot more rads. :eek:
Today, during floroscopic procedures, only essential people can be in the room and lead is mandatory (Lead aprons that cover your important bits)
Really? Fluoroscopes cause leukemia? Always? Did everyone who had their feet fluoroscoped develop leukemia? No? 50%? 10%? 1%? More than others who weren’t exposed?
Hmmm.
X-rays are used today routinely, in almost every hospital. What is different between having a chest X-Ray now and having a foot X-Ray then? Dosage? Coverage?
To see how well the shoe fit the foot. Since many shoes were stiff leather, it was not easy to tell for a child. My mother used to try to pinch the toe with her thumb, with limited success. Flouroscopes took the guesswork out of shoe fitting. Or at least were supposed to.
A floroscope is a machine that delivers X-rays (gamma rays). No, floroscopes don’t, cause leukemia, but large doses of x-rays can. There are several cancers that have been linked to over-exposure to x-rays. One is thyroid cancer, linked to using irradiation for acne in the '40’s. We’re finding that years after successful bone marrow transplants, those that received high dose irradiation, are developing other forms of cancer 10 or more years later.
The kids having their feet x-rayed weren’t followed. there would be no way to track them over the years to see if they had a higher incidence of cancer. The shoe sales people were likewise, not tracked, therefore no statistics exist about their cancer rates either. The machines delivering the x-rays weren’t shielded as the hospital equipment today is.
Chest x-ray are targeted. The gonads are covered (or should be) with lead.
In the case of the shoe store x-rays they were not focused, but scattered, exposing everyone around it. The people administering hospital x-rays wear lead aprons and badges that tell how much radiation they have been exposed to. when it exceeds the limit, they can’t be exposed again.
The shoestore x-rays were a bad idea because they exposed unwary individuals to potential long term health problem. That’s not to say that every person exposed had long term problems, but the risk was too great to ignore.
In my experience, X-ray technicians nowadays also leave the room altogether, using a remote control.
I recall my Mom checking my new shoes w/ those things. Musicat is right on, we
mostly wore hard leather shoes and wanted some “growing space” in the toe area.
The pinch test was not reliable and the fluoroscope was supposed to take out the
guess factor.
(Slight hijack) I had a broken leg as a kid and I remember the doc letting me look at
my leg under his fluoroscope. I learned that he eventually died from cancer caused by
radiation poisoning, wonder how many medical workers were affected by that kind of
ignorance.
Don’t modern x rays use a much lower dose than they used to, due to advances in photographic emulsion technologies?
X-rays and gamma rays are not the same thing. Gammas have much higher energy, and are typically much more dangerous. They also wouldn’t be much use for looking at bones, since a typical gamma ray would pass through human bones nearly as easily as through the flesh (and the shoe).
Yes, but more cautions are taken, too.
True, but note that the line dividing X-rays and gamma rays is an arbitrary one. (Cancer-zapping X-rays, generated with a linear accelerator instead of a cathode, are much more powerful than diagnostic X-rays.)
I remember that when I was a child, coming home from Eaton’s on the bus after using the machine and buying shoes. Two giant amoebas, each the size of a giant apple pancake, slithered up a pants leg and up under my shirt, at which point there were four of them, then slimed up to my face and nearly smothered me.
But it was the '50s, so nobody thought much about it.
My mistake. When I worked in bone marrow research, our patients got TBI (total body irradiation.) To keep confusion to a minimum in a very stressful environment we described the irradiation as “like x-rays” I guess I came to think of them as the same.
Sorry.