I know it's infuriating when anyone presents both sides of an issue
and says: "let the audience decide".
And I don't really like doing meta stuff where I talk about
the process of making videos, but I can't find any other way
to give enough context to make this video work.
Hence the "come for a walk with me
through a rough bit of the English countryside" GoPro camera shot.
It's important to break the format visually as well.
I've been sharing videos from around Germany, Austria and Switzerland
over the past couple of weeks.
One of the first things I filmed on that trip was the
radon tunnel, the "radonstollen", in Bad Kreuznach in south-west Germany.
The video should have gone out weeks ago.
But despite filming going really well on location, despite
being really happy with my script and the interview at the time,
I just wasn't comfortable with it when I got back here to the UK.
Radon, or "rad-don" if you're German, is a colorless, odorless, radioactive gas
that's produced naturally by uranium decay.
All around the world, tiny tiny amounts of it seep out from
wide areas of the ground and get diluted into the atmosphere harmlessly.
But if your house is in a particularly bad radon area, like here in Oxfordshire,
then you can get detectors installed or tests done to check that
radon isn't building up inside your house and exposing you to too much radiation.
Which is why I was surprised that there are a few places in the world
where people go to be exposed to radon deliberately for pain relief.
So: the radon tunnel in Bad Kreuznach.
- It is a tunnel that was founded 1775.
People tried to find mercury here. They dug for mercury.
They did never find mercury, but round about 110 years ago, they found radon.
The dose is, per one hour treatment, between 30-60 thousand bequerels.
On average you need ten treatments, one hour.
At the end, the application will have a dose of around about 2.2 millisieverts.
To give you an idea what is the equivalent:
if you have, for instance, X-rays of your hip or your knee,
it is more or less the same, equivalent.
A complete CT of the complete body has about between 20 and 40 millisieverts.
- Every medically trained person that I've talked to about radon therapy,
they've all gone through the same three stages that I did.
First of all, complete skepticism, "oh, that sounds like a bad idea".
Certainly, most of the world would consider deliberate exposure
to radioactive gas for pain relief as alternative medicine.
That's what I did.
And then stage two.
You look at the scientific papers and, yes, the marketing,
that talk about what limited trials there have been, and the patient
testimonials, and the theories about why it works, and the reaction becomes...
agh, I guess maybe it's worth a look?
But there's a conflict of interest declaration in that paper.
But it says the funders had no say in the results or the release.
And there is almost a folk belief in some parts of the nuclear industry,
particularly in the US, about something called "radiation hormesis", where
very small doses of radiation can have a beneficial effect, they think,
because they cause repair systems in your body to kick into action.
But that is an idea, a hypothesis.
It's not even really a theory yet.
It's not been properly tested.
All the major international authorities say that it's entirely unproven
and there isn't really any truly safe dose of radiation.
And yet, radon therapy seems to work for a lot of people.
So then you've reached the third stage:
not knowing how to even talk about this responsibly.
That's where I'm at.
I've met the people who run a radon tunnel.
I've talked to a patient.
I've got a duty of care to them, as I do to anyone I film with.
But I also have a duty to the audience
and to the truth: scientific or historical or personal.
So I need to make something very clear.
This is not an endorsement.
I think radon therapy is fascinating.
The people who run the radon spa definitely think it works.
Certainly, most of their patients do.
There's just enough evidence here that this unqualified skeptic
can't write it off, not immediately.
And the fact that there's all this infrastructure for handling radioactive gas
as part of something that most of the world hasn't even heard of?
Well, I think that's interesting enough to at least discuss.
- Just to make clear: it is not "wellness", it's not miracles.
We do not promise something weird.
It is pure medicine.
It's a medical application where you need a doctor's prescription.
And at the end, 85% of the patients, they report it helped, it worked.
So you get rid of your medication for pain relievers for one year and more.
It is not wellness. That's really... it must be clear.
Obviously, to get a license for this, especially in Germany,
it's a really huge and complicated process,
and therefore we have to prove that the minimum application of the doses
is not below 30,000Bq and the maximum dose is never above 100,000Bq.
We are always, in the average, somewhere between
30-60 thousand, which is a perfect range for the treatment.
- There are plenty of doctors and health insurance companies in Germany
that endorse radon therapy, but that isn't evidence for it working.
The British National Health Service paid
for some homeopathic treatments until 2017, despite a mountain of evidence
proving that homeopathy does absolutely nothing.
Homeopathy may feel like it works for some people, but if you just
give people a sugar pill, a placebo, and say "it'll help with your pain",
a lot of the time feels like it does help, at least for the short term.
The placebo effect isn't quite as magical as some folks think,
but certainly very powerful for sensations like pain and nausea...
the sort of things that radon therapy is intended to treat.
But the trouble is that radon spas aren't like homeopathy or like magnet therapy.
They're not popular enough to have been comprehensively tested.
Anecdotes are not evidence for something medical, particularly when radiation is involved.
The warning signs of quackery, of fake medicine, are: bold claims about miracle cures;
single interventions that claim to help wildly different conditions;
or explanations that defy the laws of physics.
It's not guaranteed to be quackery
if you've got those, of course, but those are the warning signs.
In other parts of the world, radon therapy is much less regulated.
In Montana, USA, say, there are old radon-filled mines that just charge admission to go sit inside.
And some of them make wild claims about helping diabetes, gout, asthma, MS or even cancer.
But the claims made in Germany are much more limited and specific.
It's just for relief of chronic pain,
and the cause of chronic pain can often be a mystery.
And so can how to treat it.
- The treatment doesn't work instantly,
so if you leave the tunnel, you are not instantly cured.
Patients, they report to us, normally it takes some days, up to 6-8 weeks,
when it works.
We are aware that some other tunnels worldwide, they claim they can cure anything.
We are pain relief, pain relief from inflammatory process.
Not more and not less.
Normally, people think "radioactivity,
oh, that's harmful!" but it is always the same question: it's the doses
that makes sense, and what we here apply.
You see this equipment that is monitoring how much radon is emitted,
and we do emit radon in that quantity
that is necessary to initiate healing processes.
- There's one line in that big analysis paper
that says it's really difficult to do a fully double-blind study about this.
That would be where each patient doesn't know
if they're receiving radon or not, and neither do the staff or the doctors.
Yes, radon is colorless and odorless, but it's always there, coming out the ground.
You can't fool people into walking into a somehow-identical tunnel or cabin
that you've just mysteriously constructed next door to the old one,
but that doesn't happen to have radon in it this time.
Except: in that one tunnel in Bad Kreuznach, you can turn off the radon.
- This is absolutely unique, and to my knowledge,
no other tunnel worldwide has the same technique.
And that is why we are, today, absolutely safe.
As you see on the monitor, we have no radioactivity here
besides the normal activity you have outside.
The radon gas is emitted very deep down
in that mountain and it is naturally emitted.
At the end, we just grab the gas with with a pipeline
and a kind of fan that transports it into this room.
And we can switch it on and off in the proportion we need it.
- That's why I was allowed to film in the treatment room.
It didn't have any radon in it.
Not then, anyway. It hadn't been used for hours.
All the ventilation meant there was just fresh air in there.
It would absolutely be possible
to set up a proper, large-scale, double-blind study in that tunnel.
If some university or government wanted to fund it.
If they could find enough willing patients.
If their ethics review board
would be willing to sign off on treating people with radioactive gas.
And if it could be arranged that no-one, not even the staff at the tunnel,
knew whether each patient was getting radon therapy or just fresh air.
It would be difficult.
But it's more possible there than anywhere else, and I want that trial to happen.
That's why I decided to talk about this and put the video out.
That's why I'm willing to risk giving an audience to something
that isn't proven yet, because if that works as claimed,
even just for some people with chronic pain, it'd be brilliant.
Very minor radiation exposure is a risk that
a lot of people would be willing to take, clearly are willing to take,
if they can't get pain relief any other way.
And if it doesn't work, then we probably need to stop exposing people to radiation?
I know it's a cop-out to say "more studies are required".
It's the weak ending to every inconclusive undergraduate paper,
but in this case, it's true.
More studies are required, and hopefully those studies will happen soon.
Because I would love to go back to a radon spa in a few years' time
and follow up with the proof.