"Unsolicited reports from users established the fact that results are highly gratifying," read one ad that began appearing in Archives of Otolaryngology in February 1946. Radium was also hawked in medical journals, where advertisements boasted that by the 1960s at least 2,600 applicators had been sold or leased by the now-defunct Radium Chemical Co. Raymond Gaito Sr., Haines' former partner, said follow-up examinations were prudent for radium patients, although there was no evidence linking the treatments to cancer. In a letter written earlier this year to a concerned patient, Dr. Haines died in 1993, and doctors at his former practice declined repeated invitations to comment. "There is no more discomfort than would be experienced from a sunlamp treatment to develop that winter tan." "Even an exposure of twice the regular dose would have little or no unfavorable effects," wrote Haines in 1945 in a medical journal. Haines treated Mandel with radium and pioneered its use at the Navy's submarine base near New London, Conn. Henry Haines, who learned the treatment from one of its inventors. The radium therapy was developed at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore and was popularized by enthusiasts such as Dr. "They used them for years," said Stewart Farber of Pawtucket, R.I.
It is virtually impossible to determine how many people received the radium treatments, but a public-health scientist who has researched the issue believes the total could easily exceed 130,000. One of her four children was born deaf and another with a disease that causes tumors all over the body. Wood had breast cancer and suffers from Hashimoto's disease, a rare type of thyroid enlargement, depression, anxiety and salivary-gland swelling. "They put cocaine up my nose first, then came the radium," recalls Judith Wood, 59, a North Stonington, Conn., homemaker, of her childhood treatments for recurrent colds. Radium, it was thought, was a good way to shrink tissues near the Eustachian tubes to treat deafness, reduce ear pain and damage from atmospheric changes and to decrease mucus secretions. "It would be really nice to have a reason to put to all this," Mandel, 38, said in a recent telephone interview from her home in Manchester, Conn.īefore the hazards of radium came to light, doctors used it to prevent burst eardrums and to treat hearing loss, adenoid troubles and even the common cold. Thousands of veterans and civilians alike are questioning whether the nasopharyngeal radium treatments they received from doctors in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s damaged their health later. Military flight crews, facing similar problems from high altitudes, also received radium capsules.
The treatment Mandel received before she was a year old was the same therapy the Navy gave submariners whose ears were damaged by underwater pressure.
WASHINGTON - Liza Mandel wonders whether the radium treatment she received for ear infections when she was an infant is to blame for her several miscarriages, daily headaches, brittle teeth and sinus trouble.
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