This is comics. They could drag a story out for years about that side effect and than just eventually find a way to work around it, like every other power, or at the least the tragedy could have been a well written story. M.R. took the easy shock value route to try to make his run have some impact. Not that it really matters, no one is doing anything with these characters since a bunch of Avenger's writers decided to write to the end to a major X-Men storyline. Honestly, sometimes I think the abandonment of this team and concept was the end of my feeling there was anything left of the old X-Men dream.