A worker fell into a nuclear reactor pool

It turns out that there's a wealth of evidence which shows that appropriate introductions of stress (cardio training, resistance training, fine-motor-control practice) do in fact lead to improvements: greater heart health, better pulmonary function, increased strength, greater bone density, improved blood sugar regulation, decreased overall stress response, and more.

Yes, overtraining is possible (and not infrequent, particularly by those who fail to read or ignore the evidence). But an absolutely sedentary lifestyle is exceptionally fatal.

Medications (as with exercise) come with both intended and unintended consequences, as well as costs and inconveniences. Generally the more extreme the condition you're treating, the more likely that medications will carry some of these disadvantages (e.g., chemotherapy against cancer, where the goal is often to kill the malignancy at least slightly faster than one kills the patient). Exercise operates through complex feedback cycles and mechanisms, not all of which are well-understood (as an example, why muscle grows in response to strength training being a fundamental case despite much information on how muscle responds to which specific training protocols). Medications can amplify training response (e.g., anabolic steroids for strength training athletes), but often don't by themselves substitute for it.

This is why, in a broader sense, that the Baconian scientific method does not rely simply on a priori hypotheses, but tests these with experiment and evidence, that is, empirically. The ultimate critique of pure reason is that whilst it can be a useful guide for what you then want to test empirically, it has a phenomenal tendency to lead one to utterly fallacious and/or irrelevant conclusions.

One of the more robust sets of evidence on both the negative effects of a zero-stress lifestyle and of the benefits of regular cardio and strength training is that accumulated through long-term space missions, largely aboard the International Space Station (ISS). Microgravity would be the ultimate low-stress environment, and it turns out to be seriously harmful. Astronauts there are tested before and after missions, with various measures of fitness loss. With time-in-space being an immensely valuable resource, astronauts also spend two hours per day engaged in physical exercise (https://www.asc-csa.gc.ca/eng/astronauts/living-in-space/phy...>), or 1/8 of their waking schedule.

Online, ExRx (https://exrx.net/>) has a large library of fitness information, including a list of online journals (https://exrx.net/Journals>) and expert talks (https://exrx.net/Talks>). Good books on fitness will link to research substantiating recommendations (Lou Schuler's New Rules of Lifting series is a good example of this).

Your fact checking was not successful: there is no typical background expressed in counts. Background count rates vary globally by significant amounts, but importantly, they vary by device. Some devices may get a measly 10-20 counts per minute in a background, next to another device that could get 500. It also matters what kind of radiation the device is configured to detect.

At any rate 300 is widely recognizable as not an alarming value for a typical contamination detector in a typical configuration, but the report is likely slightly deficient because it does not specify how the measurement was taken. However, even if we accept 100 as the background CPM value, 300 on 100 does not represent significant contamination in a typical environment (but does imply some occurred).

Why is this interesting? Workers gets injured all the time and sometimes even die on various accidents in all industries and nobody ever talk about it. Is this anti-nuclear propaganda?

The article seems to indicate that the radiation level in their hair was notably elevated.

> I don't claim to know better.

You very much do, if you're calling into question the statements in the article that it's fine.