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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

#31

Post by OutOfHere »

jellyroll42 wrote: post #12
OutOfHere wrote: post #8

Deleted.

Please look up Bayes' Theorem wrt testing for disease

Did you mean Bayes rule and not Bayes theorem?

In any case, people like you will get others killed. Like I said previously, with your logic, no one should even be stepping on a weighing scale or getting routine annual blood tests. The higher level goal is to lower the burden of testing to make it cheap and widely available to everyone for routine use.

Consider the case in England where they checked hospital admissions for HIV despite the absence of symptoms calling for it. They found very many patients who were HIV positive and didn't know it. Your misuse of math would've let them stay undiagnosed while the cases mount. Refer to DOI 10.1016/S2352-3018(26)00109-8.

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

#32

Post by atahanacar »

OutOfHere wrote: post #8

Deleted.

>The big-medicine industrial complex is always trying to get you to have worse health so they can maximize how much they bill you when you finally break.

Ok, if this is the argument that you want to use, here is a counterargument that completely destroys your viewpoint.

Most civilized countries don't bill the patient, and it is entirely funded by either taxes or mandatory public insurance. So just like how it is in "big-medicine industrial complex's" best interest to maximize profits, it is in the health system's best interest to lower cost. So if whole-body scans for otherwise healthy (as in no symptoms) people means less profit for those companies, it means less cost for the health system, which would mean they would be promoting (or even requiring) whole-body scans. MRI machines are much cheaper than doctors.

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

#33

Post by OutOfHere »

atahanacar wrote: post #32
OutOfHere wrote: post #8

Deleted.

>The big-medicine industrial complex is always trying to get you to have worse health so they can maximize how much they bill you when you finally break. Ok, if this is the argument that you want to use, here is a counterargument that completely destroys your viewpoint. Most civilized countries don't bill the patient, and it is entirely funded by either taxes or mandatory public insurance. So just like how it is in "…

The big-medicine industrial complex in this context is not the insurance firm, whether public or private. It is the biomedical firms that are developing expensive new treatments costing five, six, or seven digit dollars per patient per year, and these firms very much would prefer if you didn't take steps to catch conditions early or prevent them cheaply.

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

#34

Post by aeternum »

SoftTalker wrote: post #23
andruby wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Things such as a needless biopsy of healthy tissue, leading to an infection and sepsis. A colonoscopy perforating the bowel and leading to an infection and sepsis. These things happen, they are not common but they are not zero-chance events either. And you have to consider the opportunity costs of consuming the doctor's time, the labwork, and the facilities, possibly delaying treatment for someone else who actually n…

Yes it would be better if it took these into account but doing so would not change the overall numbers.

Risk of perforation is something like .03% and almost never fatal whereas a colonoscopy reduces colorectal cancer mortality by 60-70%.

>And you have to consider the opportunity costs of consuming the doctor's time, the labwork, and the facilities, possibly delaying treatment for someone else who actually needs it.

That is also rarely true. More often, greater demand for a service soon yields economies of scale, more efficiencies and overall more patients served at a lower price. Low volume is expensive, high volume is cheap.

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

#35

Post by atahanacar »

OutOfHere wrote: post #33
atahanacar wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The big-medicine industrial complex is always trying to get you to have worse health so they can maximize how much they bill you when you finally break. Ok, if this is the argument that you want to use, here is a counterargument that completely destroys your viewpoint. Most civilized countries don't bill the patient, and it is entirely funded by either taxes or mandatory public insurance. So just like how it is in "…

The big-medicine industrial complex in this context is not the insurance firm, whether public or private. It is the biomedical firms that are developing expensive new treatments costing five, six, or seven digit dollars per patient per year, and these firms very much would prefer if you didn't take steps to catch conditions early or prevent them cheaply.

Those firms have no say over which treatments are preferred on which patients in single-payer health systems. Actually, it is the exact opposite. When there is a single payer, they can haggle on behalf of the entire population so they have huge leverage over the treatment costs. The government can simply say "You either sell at the price that I want, or lose access to the entire market in this country.". That's why American drugs can be 10-100x more expensive than the rest of the world.

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

#36

Post by LorenPechtel »

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.

Doesn't need to be significant injury from every incident.

My wife had an MRI, incidental find on it caused a PET CT scan.

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

#37

Post by OutOfHere »

atahanacar wrote: post #35
OutOfHere wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big-medicine industrial complex in this context is not the insurance firm, whether public or private. It is the biomedical firms that are developing expensive new treatments costing five, six, or seven digit dollars per patient per year, and these firms very much would prefer if you didn't take steps to catch conditions early or prevent them cheaply.

Those firms have no say over which treatments are preferred on which patients in single-payer health systems. Actually, it is the exact opposite. When there is a single payer, they can haggle on behalf of the entire population so they have huge leverage over the treatment costs. The government can simply say "You either sell at the price that I want, or lose access to the entire market in this country.". That's why A…

Their employees are here on this site too, downvoting preventative care and anything that grants health at a low cost to individuals. The corresponding gatekeeper organizations like the Endocrine Society and the The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology do their best to shamelessly disinform and seriously harm the people, e.g. via DOI 10.1210/clinem/dgae290. And don't even get me started wrt how corrupt the FDA is, serving the biomedical firms, not the people.

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

#40

Post by m463 »

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"

Title might qualify for a change as "linkbait":

Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait

- https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

linkbait?

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