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Pratik Samant

@samantp.bsky.social
281 followers 121 following 142 posts

He/Him | NHS Radiotherapy Physicist | I occasionally post cancer/physics facts | Views my own | 🇨🇦 in 🇬🇧 www.oncology.ox.ac.uk/team/pratik-s…

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Reposted by Pratik Samant
University of Oxford Department of Oncology @oncology.ox.ac.uk · 21/03/2025
Congratulations to Daniel McGowan on receiving the NHS South East Healthcare Science Award for Educational Leadership🏆👨‍🏫 This award is in recognition of Dan's NHS education work & for developing the MSc in Medical Physics w/ Radiobiology programme @medsci.ox.ac.uk @ox.ac.uk @ouhospitals.bsky.social
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Ben Collins @bencollins.bsky.social · 07/04/2025
The administration is a perfect storm of dumb people who enjoy inflicting pain and are addicted to psychotic cruelty and quadrupling down. It ends in total ruin if you don't impeach him.
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Jerry Chen @jcsalterego.bsky.social · 13/01/2025
first of all, some housekeeping. you may be seeing mentions of "RN" thinking it's referring to RedNote, a tiktok competitor. this is incorrect—RN stands for ReNner, as in the Jeremy Renner app
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Pratik Samant @samantp.bsky.social · 10/01/2025
🧪Cancer fact of the day:
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Pratik Samant @samantp.bsky.social · 11/12/2024
🧪Cancer fact of the day: Astronauts are at higher risk for cancer because of increased exposure to cosmic radiation in space. NASA sets the acceptable level of cancer risk from space radiation as a 3% fatal cancer risk at the upper 95% confidence interval. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Carcinogenesis induced by space radiation: A systematic review
The carcinogenic risk from space radiation has always been a health risk issue of great concern during space exploration. In recent years, a large number of cellular and animal experiments have demons...
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Colleen Morgan @clmorgan.bsky.social · 10/12/2024
"Their struggles and their deprivation are written on their skeletons." 🏺 If you'd like to read an archaeology article that will rip your heart out and radicalise you, read this. Skip to the discussion/conclusions if graphs aren't your thing: journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...
journals.plos.org
The expendables: Bioarchaeological evidence for pauper apprentices in 19th century England and the health consequences of child labour
Child labour is the most common form of child abuse in the world today, with almost half of child workers employed in hazardous industries. The large-scale employment of children during the rapid indu...
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Pratik Samant @samantp.bsky.social · 10/12/2024
🧪Cancer fact of the day: A single organism, Helicobacter pylori, is responsible for 90% of gastric cancers! H pylori has infected about 2/3 of the world's population, but is usually asymptomatic. wwwnc.cdc.gov/travel/yello...
wwwnc.cdc.gov
Helicobacter pylori | CDC Yellow Book 2024 Homeexpandexpandexpandexpandexpandexpandexpandexpand
Information about how to order the U.S. government publication about traveling titled "Health Information for International Travel" (also called the "Yellow Book")....
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Pratik Samant @samantp.bsky.social · 09/12/2024
🧪Cancer fact of the day: Drinking alcohol combined with smoking increases the risk of head and neck cancers by much more than either habit alone. The synergistic effect to increase cancer risk is more than multiplicative! pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19190158/
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Interaction between tobacco and alcohol use and the risk of head and neck cancer: pooled analysis in the International Head and Neck Cancer Epidemiology Consortium - PubMed
Our results confirm that the joint effect between tobacco and alcohol use is greater than multiplicative on head and neck cancer risk. However, a substantial proportion of head and neck cancers cannot...
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Pratik Samant @samantp.bsky.social · 06/12/2024
🧪Cancer fact of the day: In the UK, roughly half of people will get cancer in their lifetime. www.nhs.uk/conditions/c...
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Chris Hayes @chrislhayes.bsky.social · 05/12/2024
just repeating the phrase "hawk tuah girl meme coin" over and over until my brain is as smooth as a polished stone
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Pratik Samant @samantp.bsky.social · 05/12/2024
🧪Cancer fact of the day: Cancer is at least as old as the dinosaurs, and likely even older. www.history.com/news/oldest-...
history.com
How Old Is Cancer? At Least as Old as the Start of the Dinosaurs, Fossil Shows | HISTORY
A malignant tumor found in a 240 million‑year‑old turtle bone shows that cancer has been plaguing living things since the Triassic Period.
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Pratik Samant @samantp.bsky.social · 04/12/2024
artsandculture.google.com/story/the-le...
artsandculture.google.com
The leaden box and the gram of radium - Google Arts & Culture
Google Arts & Culture features content from over 2000 leading museums and archives who have partnered with the Google Cultural Institute to bring the world's treasures online.
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Pratik Samant @samantp.bsky.social · 04/12/2024
Cancer fact of the day 🧪: early radiotherapy largely relied on one element, radium. The metal was therefore extremely valuable and needed to be kept in vaults. One gram of radium used to cost ~£1.6 million in today's currency, which is more than its weight in diamonds!
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God @thegodshow.com · 03/12/2024
How have literal billionaires convinced so many Americans that the people picking their strawberries are the villains
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Pratik Samant @samantp.bsky.social · 03/12/2024
Peto's paradox cannot be explained away by lifestyle choices because it is observed across multiple species (including non humans, who don't really make lifestyle choices). It is a cellular phenomenon.
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Pratik Samant @samantp.bsky.social · 03/12/2024
🧪Cancer fact of the day: Peto's paradox has led scientists to explore if humans can suppress cancers as effectively as larger mammals do. Elephant cells are more vigilant for cancer than ours, and take potential mutational threats more seriously. news.cancerresearchuk.org/2023/08/12/c...
news.cancerresearchuk.org
What can elephants teach us about cancer? - Cancer Research UK - Cancer News
For World Elephant Day, we're taking a look at why elephants so rarely get cancer. Could the ways they protect themselves help people too?
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Pratik Samant @samantp.bsky.social · 02/12/2024
🧪Cancer fact of the day: Radiotherapy does one better than this, by modulating delivered dose in 3D. Cancer cells are already more vulnerable to radiation, and on top of that we give them more radiation dose than healthy tissue. This minimizes side effects as best as possible.
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Chris Boyd @paperghost.bsky.social · 29/11/2024
while "open borders UK" is in the news: here's someone caught by the minimum income requirement increase from £18k to £29k, and now has to crowdfund 17 grand for the savings route so their spouse isn't kicked out of the country
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Pratik Samant @samantp.bsky.social · 28/11/2024
www.oncology.ox.ac.uk/team/pratik-... @physgal.bsky.social Hoping that uni url counts as evidence in that case to be added ! :)
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Chris Hayes @chrislhayes.bsky.social · 28/11/2024
For the first time in a while overdose deaths are declining - seven straight months of declines. The cause is complicated but appears to be the culmination of a number of different Biden admin policy initiatives coming to fruition. And yet it meant absolutely nothing politically.
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Pratik Samant @samantp.bsky.social · 28/11/2024
🧪Cancer fact of the day: Radiation dose delivery at this level of precision doesn't happen all by itself! Engineers and physicists perform regular quality checks and corrections on every radiotherapy machine. This is one of the primary duties of radiotherapy physicists in the hospital.
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Skeleton Claw @skeletonclaw.bsky.social · 19/11/2024
This is why I got into science in the first place
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Pratik Samant @samantp.bsky.social · 27/11/2024
🧪Cancer fact of the day: modern radiotherapy is less like a blunt instrument, and more like a precision strike. For example, stereotactic radiosurgery can treat tumours as small as 0.7-1cm in diameter (about as large as a grain of rice), while having the dose reduce by 20 fold just 1.5cm away!
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Pratik Samant @samantp.bsky.social · 26/11/2024
That being said, there is a very very small (less than 1%) chance that radiotherapy can cause a second cancer. This is far less than the probability of controlling the tumour however, and...well...our patients already *have* cancer, so the risk/benefit is pretty good.
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Pratik Samant @samantp.bsky.social · 26/11/2024
DNA damage (double strand breakage to be specific) to cancer cells is typically fatal. They need DNA to keep dividing. Without it they will either die or be unable to replicate (which is just as good).
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Keith Edwards @keithedwards.bsky.social · 26/11/2024
Incredible how the narrative changes as soon as the election is over
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Pratik Samant @samantp.bsky.social · 26/11/2024
I wish I could like this more than once. Well done on getting through what must have been a long month. Good luck for those ahead, and I'm glad to hear that the benefits are so far outweighing side effects.
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Pratik Samant @samantp.bsky.social · 26/11/2024
I'm very sorry to hear that, it is a brutal and relentless disease. I hope his new medication worked better ❤️
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Pratik Samant @samantp.bsky.social · 26/11/2024
Sorry about that! Here is a summary (and a more updated) page on challenges facing modern radiotherapy. We absolutely have an image problem 😅, but we are working on it. There remains evidence we are underusing it to this day sadly. radiotherapy.org.uk/get-involved...
radiotherapy.org.uk
Radiotherapy4Life • Radiotherapy UK
Radiotherapy kills cancer. Radiotherapy saves lives. We are campaigning for a modern, world-class radiotherapy service. A campaign to stop people dying
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Pratik Samant @samantp.bsky.social · 26/11/2024
That is unfortunately the case with most/all cancer therapy. Modern RT takes very deliberate steps to minimize the damage to healthy tissue (e.g. modern machines can sculpt the dose in 3D). It is used in more than 50% of cancer patients and has been a major factor in doubling UK cancer survival.
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Pratik Samant @samantp.bsky.social · 26/11/2024
It's not a random question, don't be sorry! Questions like that are always welcome (by me, at least!)
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Pratik Samant @samantp.bsky.social · 26/11/2024
The safety profile of modern day radiotherapy is excellent. It is not perfect but there is now a mountain of evidence that it is a safe, effective therapy that offers excellent treatment options for cure and palliation. It is also feared and underused, which costs lives. www.bmj.com/content/342/...
bmj.com
Radiotherapy in UK is feared and underused
Radiotherapy has an image problem, says a newly created pressure group. The National Radiotherapy Awareness Initiative reports that less than a 10th of people in the United Kingdom regard the interven...
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Pratik Samant @samantp.bsky.social · 26/11/2024
Unfortunately I am a physicist not a doctor 😉, so I don't know. When I say unstable I mostly mean less able to repair itself with worse housekeeping, so not sure of implications for its long term molecular stability. My (un)educated guess would be perhaps it's not too different than normal DNA?
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Pratik Samant @samantp.bsky.social · 26/11/2024
Ah yes, while we're asking the Tories how best to run the economy, let's also ask the captain of the Titanic how best to get a ship across the Atlantic, Neville Chamberlain how best to avoid a European war, and Napoleon on when the best time of year is to conquer Russia.
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Pratik Samant @samantp.bsky.social · 26/11/2024
🧪Cancer fact of the day: Cancer cell DNA is unstable, and so quite fragile. Especially as compared to healthy cells. X-ray radiation causes DNA damage to all cells it hits. Cancerous cells fare worse than healthy cells when this happens, which is why radiotherapy is an effective cancer treatment.
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merr-itt came from outer space @merrittk.com · 30/06/2024
if you werent here in the early days of bluesky you missed some really funny stuff. a bunch of people got psyched out of their minds on having 1000 followers for the first time and tried to cancel dril
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Pratik Samant @samantp.bsky.social · 25/11/2024
🧪Cancer fact of the day: Cancerous tumours command the body to build blood vessels around them (angiogenesis). The body obliges, therefore enabling the tumour to grow much larger than it could otherwise. Inhibiting this process has enabled effective cancer therapies! www.cancer.gov/about-cancer...
cancer.gov
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Mehdi Hasan @mehdirhasan.bsky.social · 24/11/2024
Difficult to describe what a dangerous moment we are in. The owner of Twitter/richest man in the world/closest adviser to the next US president is promoting a far-right Tommy Robinson (!) documentary to his 200 million followers. This is the mainstreaming of violent, Islamophobic fascism.
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The Beaverton @thebeaverton.com · 22/11/2024
Opinion: Bluesky is a dangerous echo chamber because no one wants to hear from me, specifically
thebeaverton.com
Opinion: Bluesky is a dangerous echo chamber because no one wants to hear from me, specifically
They just… blocked me. Like I’m some kind of annoyance, rather than the iconoclastic and fascinating truth-teller which I know myself to be.
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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez @aoc.bsky.social · 23/11/2024
One thing I find interesting about the echo chamber complaint is that an echo chamber just won a presidential election. Put aside the convo of whether it’s “good” or “bad” for a moment. The far right has devoted enormous resources + time to building echo chambers & loathes spaces they don’t control
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Chris Hayes @chrislhayes.bsky.social · 23/11/2024
One of the central theses of my latest book is that in our current version of attention capitalism the *brand* is increasingly more important than the *product* and this last election sure seems like a good example.
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Saturn's Herb Garden 🌿 🖤 @satanspetgoat.bsky.social · 22/11/2024
So that's why things that cause cancer are called carcinogens?!?!?! I love etymology.
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Sonja Dieterich @sonjadieterich.bsky.social · 22/11/2024
It would be nice if one of the #MedPhys on here could build us a feed.
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Cslmn @rapsacnomlas.bsky.social · 22/11/2024
Have to agree with this. The great thing about Twitter was that I was able to bring so many of the right-wingers that I encountered there round to my viewpoint, with the force of my arguments
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Brandy Schillace @bschillace.brandyschillace.com · 22/11/2024
Well happy Friday! I saw @astrokatie.com talking about why following science folk is awesome—and decided to make a thread for 🧪 starter packs (these are not created by me, but the creators are usually first listed): 1. Science communication go.bsky.app/22TWpuq
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Andrew J. Steinmetz @ajsteinmetz.com · 22/11/2024
Just going to drop one of my favorite websites ever: jila.colorado.edu/~ajsh/ It's a treasure trove of interesting information and animations related to black hole physics. #Physics #Science 🧪⚛️
jila.colorado.edu
Andrew Hamilton's Homepage
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Nihar Gupte @nihar-gupte.bsky.social · 22/11/2024
Now that I’m here let show off my poster! In this paper we found evidence for eccentricity in Binary Black holes observed by LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA. You can read the paper here: arxiv.org/abs/2404.14286 and my Twitter summary here: x.com/nihar_gupte/...
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