Practical Whole Body Counter Training for Integrated Learning in Radiation Education

This article was migrated. The article was not marked as recommended. Radiation education for medical students, especially in the field of human radiation effects and its protection for public health, was one of the issues of social concern in Japan after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident. After the incident, it was felt that all physicians should be required to have an understanding of the fundamentals of radiation sciences; however, the education traditionally given was insufficient and did not address the publics' anxieties of the health effects from radioactive materials in and around the affected areas of the accident. In an attempt to address this problem, practical training of a whole body counter was conducted on a trial basis at an elective course for first year medical students. This program was intended to instruct them in four new subjects: radiation measurement of the human body, physiological kinetics of radioactive materials, understanding a subject's anxiety in respect to their contamination by radioactive materials and how to get a medical and personal history from a subject for assessing the cause of internal contamination. This practical training of the whole body counter may have the potential to be one of the education methods of teaching basic radiation sciences for medical students.