The BMJ carries a good editorial today about the risks of radiation as used in clinical practice, and suggests that we should be informing patients about the dangers as well as being careful about the use of it. But the biggest issue for me is not consent for radiation as used to investigate potentially serious symptoms, but the use of radiation in well patients as a ‘health check’, or, as the kind of private clinics who advertise this sort of stuff say, ‘health MOT’.

It’s this kind of imaging that is not evidence based and harmful for all kinds of reasons, including radiation: that’s the time when consent and full information about harms are very important.