Communicating radiation risk in healthcare: an ethical imperative amidst scientific uncertainty

The integration of ionizing radiation into modern clinical medicine underscores a critical, yet frequently inadequately addressed, institutional responsibility: patient-centered risk communication. This review synthesizes current empirical literature on how radiation risks are articulated and understood across diagnostic and therapeutic settings, distinguishing between the low-dose diagnostic applications and high-dose therapeutic radiation. Evidence indicates that despite established ethical and regulatory mandates, effective risk dialogue remains severely compromised by entrenched public knowledge gaps, media-driven anxieties, patient stress, and a bidirectional miscalibration of risks, whereby routine imaging hazards are frequently overstated and therapeutic adverse effects underestimated. These patient-level vulnerabilities are further compounded by institutional constraints, including a historic lack of formalized communication training for radiographers and the persistent underutilization of validated visual tools. To resolve these friction points, this paper identifies evidence-based communicative strategies, favoring graded disclosure frameworks, plain-language environmental analogies, and visually optimized data representations utilizing natural frequencies over rigid, "one-size-fits-all" approaches.