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A full body MRI earns you a year of smoking

entropicthoughts.com

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Re: A full body MRI earns you a year of smoking

#11

Post by valleyer »

> This doesn’t tell me a whole lot, because my intuition for QALYs is weak. How strongly should I prefer an intervention with a net benefit of 0.025 QALYs over other things I might do with my time? No idea!

> However! When marketing the effect of global health interventions, a count of 27 qalys is typically considered “a life saved”. A life also happens to be a million micromorts, and I have a much better intuition for micromorts!

This came across as unintentionally funny to me. It goes from making the joke that one obscure unit of measure is inscrutable to saying, don't worry, because we can put it in another equally obscure unit of measure!

Re: A full body MRI earns you a year of smoking

#13

Post by julianeon »

OutOfHere wrote: post #8

Deleted.

Since I think people are getting this confused:

He's saying that a full body MRI is so valuable, that if you got one and then smoked for a year, you'd be in the same place as you were before you started, health wise. No loss.

Obviously you'll come out way ahead if you don't do the smoking part: it's very valuable, in other words.

Re: A full body MRI earns you a year of smoking

#14

Post by mchusma »

djoldman wrote: post #10

The title confused me for most of the article because I assumed they were saying that getting an MRI was equivalently dangerous to a year of smoking. > So the same effort you would expend to get out of those activities on account of their risk, the same effort you should be willing to expend to get a full-body mri. "get out of those activities"

I was similarly confused. Saying a MRI is the equivalent of stopping smoking for 1 year earlier, or driving a motorcycle 10,000km less seems actually really good! Go MRIs!

As another point, most of the negative costs of getting full body scans are actually poor reactions to the full body scans. The phrasing is "Hey, if you get more information, we are going to act badly on this information." I think the solution here should be just acting better on the information, not getting less information.

Re: A full body MRI earns you a year of smoking

#16

Post by andruby »

thewillowcat wrote: post #15

This doesn't seem to account for the outcome that someone receives testing and treatment for a problem found by the MRI, and is injured in the process, despite the fact that non-treatment would have been harmless; a not-uncommon outcome in the real world.

Do you have an example? I don’t know of many diagnosis methods leading to significant injury.

Re: A full body MRI earns you a year of smoking

#19

Post by thewillowcat »

andruby wrote: post #16
thewillowcat wrote: post #15

This doesn't seem to account for the outcome that someone receives testing and treatment for a problem found by the MRI, and is injured in the process, despite the fact that non-treatment would have been harmless; a not-uncommon outcome in the real world.

Do you have an example? I don’t know of many diagnosis methods leading to significant injury.

For example, many kinds of biopsy can result in serious infection or other surgical complications.

Re: A full body MRI earns you a year of smoking

#20

Post by hn_user82179 »

andruby wrote: post #16
thewillowcat wrote: post #15

This doesn't seem to account for the outcome that someone receives testing and treatment for a problem found by the MRI, and is injured in the process, despite the fact that non-treatment would have been harmless; a not-uncommon outcome in the real world.

Do you have an example? I don’t know of many diagnosis methods leading to significant injury.

My guess is unnecessary surgeries which isn't an unreasonable concern. Something like 40% of MRIs showing spinal disc herniation are asymptomatic and the rate of surgeries to fix can be a coinflip.
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