Fluoroscopy is a moving-picture X-ray. Developed in the late 1800s, it has valid medical applications to this day. Using it to fit shoes began in the 1920s, when the risks of ionizing radiation were not well understood.
You and a salesperson peer into viewing ports to watch your bones moving in the shoe as you wiggled your toes! Very occasional use was probably not too awful, but radiation damage is cumulative, so frequent use was another story. Salespeople had cumulative exposure risk from proximity to poorly shielded devices. One salesperson rad injury required an amputation. They were fascinating to use, and children would do it just for fun.
US scientific orgs such as ACXRP issued warnings as early as 1931. Pennsylvania banned them in '57, and Switzerland in '59. By '70 they were mostly gone from the US, Canada, and Europe. A few hung around into the early '80s, illegally or inadvertently.
A 1938 unit at the US National Museum of Health and Medicine.
Most of the alleged photos I found of people using one failed an AI checker. The photo below passed, but… it’s getting harder to know for sure. I’m tryin’ here!
Any software “AI checker” is just another unreliable AI, and the results of its “tests” should not be taken seriously. Only human research and informed judgement can reliably lead to reasonable conclusions about such things.
I used to work in a radiology department, and whenever a paranoid thought about radiation exposure would enter my head, my mind would run straight to shoe-store fluoroscopes in an “it could be worse”-kinda way.
Always made me feel better lol.
I would guess these were not only worse, but way worse!
The units varied widely, but the US & Canada models averaged 0.13 Sv per 20 second use. That was to the user though. Less per use to the attendant, but they could be exposed many times per day, so more in total.
Not sure about radiology, but the web thinks the US DOE’s occupational limit for an adult is 2 mSv/yr averaged over 5 years with no more than 5 mSv in any given year. So a single use of the machine would dump about 65 times the stochastic risk into somebody’s foot as you’d get if you ran right up against the maximum 5 year average DOE acceptable limit.
I imagine you have seen the XKCD chart.
So in summary (yearly doses):
- 0.1 Sv: onset of cancer
- 0.4 Sv: onset of radiation poisoning
Please forgive me if there’s a joke flying over my head (happens a lot!), but that doesn’t seem right. A sievert is a unit of statistical risk, so it changes the odds of cancer, but short of extreme doses, it’s statistical. Both the total dose, and the rate in Sv/year matters, with higher rates being worse.
A little over a year on the ISS will get you around 0.1 Sv, but the cancer risk of that is still extremely low. Lots of people have done far more than 1 yr in space, and they aren’t dropping like flies. If 0.1 Sv was a major cancer risk, the DOE limit would be far less than 0.05 Sv/yr.
Also it would imply more than half the people who used these machines one time would’ve had a causal, not an incidental, cancer, since the short time window of the unit is the worst case way to get the exposure.
I occasionally work with nuclear measurement devices. The sources can get pretty dangerous if you do something dumb, and eventually everyone does something dumb.
But on the other hand, they used to put mineworkers in front of a full-torso fluoroscop to see if they didn’t swallow any gold. And then some manager had to sit in front of that all day looking for white lumps (and hopefully not the other kind).
they should’ve just made all the store clerks wear lead coveralls during their shifts. I’m sure it wouldn’t be too bad, they were only on their feet for, like, 9 hours straight
were only on their feet
And after enough years on the job, were only on their remaining foot.
X-RAYS!
The cover of this X-Ray Journal from 1897 is just awesome.
Looks like the androgynous god of X-rays is angling to take down an entire hemisphere! Bastard is perfectly positioning that thing above the pole.
Seems like a really shilty idea.
I wonder if you could do this in a safer way today, i.e ultrasound or something
Just taking a single xray photo instead of a continuous stream of radiation would be so much safer
Indeed! Especially with modern digital sensor tech. Wikipedia says a modern complete set of dental X-rays is 5-10 micro sieverts. Spitballing it, that’s around a factor of 20,000 less than the foot fluoroscope’s 20sec X-ray video feed.
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Yes, we use these things called a ruler, to measure the foot and the inside of the shoe… if you want to get fancy, you can do a 3D scan, those are basically instant these days.
How does seeing the inside of your foot help you get a better fit on the outside of your foot?
Apparently there is little to no evidence it actually did improve fit outcomes. The pitch was to see if bones were scrunched up, and they had a chart showing what it should and should not look like. But you can know that just by how your foot feels in the shoe.
Most likely it was a cool, if dangerous, gimmick to get people into a shoe buying sort of mood.
A ton of shoes (even today) have way too skinny a toe box for a real human foot. We may have a thing or two to learn from the land of xray shoes.
I used to work with a guy much older than me that had one of these used on him. We believed him because he was not the joking kind but none of us had ever seen or heard of one.
