41–50 of 290 posts
And anyway, you have to die of something so for me cancer would just be a sign that time's up.
“ One study in 2020 found that 95% of asymptomatic patients had some type of "abnormal" finding, but just 1.8% of these findings were indeed cancer.” This has been my experience. And I’ve had oncologists echo exactly this. In the words of one: MRIs find too much. The CT and the PET/CT are the gold standards for finding cancer, finding recurrences, and staging cancer. The trouble is the radiation dose. MRI provides ve…
Wrong? I understand MRIs are the standard for certain types of cancer like brain and spinal tumors.
With respect to whole body MRI they can be less effective because it’s not optimized, accuracy can be traded for area.
But as a general statement MRIs do not suck at cancer.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You're finding something that never would have caused you any problem in your life Is it though? Isn't it possible you could be early-detecting something serious that is much easier to treat now vs when symptoms appear?
> Isn't it possible you could be early-detecting something serious that is much easier to treat now vs when symptoms appear? It could be. It could also be the cade that you undergo invasive surgery for something that would have never caused you problems within your life. The problem is that cancer isn‘t cancer. Even if it originates from the same tissue, some tumors behave very different from others.
“ One study in 2020 found that 95% of asymptomatic patients had some type of "abnormal" finding, but just 1.8% of these findings were indeed cancer.” This has been my experience. And I’ve had oncologists echo exactly this. In the words of one: MRIs find too much. The CT and the PET/CT are the gold standards for finding cancer, finding recurrences, and staging cancer. The trouble is the radiation dose. MRI provides ve…
“MRIs…suck at cancer” Wrong? I understand MRIs are the standard for certain types of cancer like brain and spinal tumors. With respect to whole body MRI they can be less effective because it’s not optimized, accuracy can be traded for area. But as a general statement MRIs do not suck at cancer.
In a full body situation, they are looking for mets, and the uptake of radioactive sugar by the tumors will let a PET scan find them.
One important point is that many people die WITH cancer but not OF cancer. So even for the 1.8%, only a fraction of those people were going to die of the disease (or even suffer significant symptoms) - the rest were just going to die of natural causes anyway. But now you've found it you pretty much have to remove it, which has significant quality of life implications.
This seems like a wild statement. Age is a big factor in the with/of cancer factor. If someone is 80 years old then there's good chance it won't be cancer that kills them (assuming they aren't already in a late stage). But if you are 40 and you have cancer, there's a good chance you'll die of that cancer if it's left untreated. I'm personally of the opinion that cancer screening should happen earlier for younger peop…
Rohin Francis does a good video on it, which you don't have to watch because it has references underneath you can click straight through to (the video is good though): https://youtu.be/yNzQ_sLGIuA
I am frustrated by this because it seems obvious to me that "more data == better" but I guess it makes sense if you think of the scans as having high amounts of noise, and us having a poor understanding of the system we're monitoring (this never happens in tech, of course :)).
I pay an extra $60 a year to have my ophthalmologist take a digital image of my retina. It comes back as normal every year, but if something does change we can diff the image against the baseline. Maybe I don't want to look for cancer right now but if I spend $1,000 every 5 years to take an image for later use... isn't that useful?
Might be, but in the context it's also worth asking what better options you have for your health with that $1000. (for some people that question may not apply, of course, but at a population level it does, and we have population-level questions about effective use of MRI time.). And if there's something better, you should spend it on that and then ask the question _again_. So it could be that getting a whole-body MRI…
Spending 1k on a gym membership and more fresh vegetables would be a pretty high return on investment, if one isn't in shape and eating healthy already.
“ One study in 2020 found that 95% of asymptomatic patients had some type of "abnormal" finding, but just 1.8% of these findings were indeed cancer.” This has been my experience. And I’ve had oncologists echo exactly this. In the words of one: MRIs find too much. The CT and the PET/CT are the gold standards for finding cancer, finding recurrences, and staging cancer. The trouble is the radiation dose. MRI provides ve…
I had a CT scan last year for some stomach issues they wanted to look at. Doctor warned me up front that the odds the images find something that looks weird is high but not to panic because of how many false positives there are when looking inside someone’s body. While I am happy to report they didn’t find anything serious, I do take slight offense to the following at the top of my results: Last name, First name: Unr…
No offense for me, just confusion. One of the status reports started as follows:
> OptionOfT is a very pleasant 36-year-old gentleman 6 weeks status post left anterior total hip arthroplasty done by Dr. _ on _.
I asked my wife whether I was particularly friendly (I sometimes fail to adjust my demeanor in certain situations).
She said: nah, they write that for everybody.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
hmm that is still around 1.5% of ppl having cancer. not trivial. Even more if you include false negatives.
I mean, i think you need to look more into it than that. If you make a test that always returns true, it would also meet that criteria.
I pay an extra $60 a year to have my ophthalmologist take a digital image of my retina. It comes back as normal every year, but if something does change we can diff the image against the baseline. Maybe I don't want to look for cancer right now but if I spend $1,000 every 5 years to take an image for later use... isn't that useful?
Er wait is retinal cancer a thing?
Doctors here are cognitively captured by a system designed to limit cost (and that's mostly a good thing) But scanning frequently is overwhelmingly good for the patient. The problem is the doctors. Imagine two possibilities. 1. You scan every six months and a doctor reviews your scans but never tells you anything no matter what 2. You scan every six months and a doctor reviews your scans and only tells you results if…
Here, you have a tool with a ~100% false positive rate, so if we start administering it to everyone, it will almost certainly cost lives. Botched biopsies, unnecessary treatments, other complications. Not to mention the huge cost that would divert money from other welfare programs. So you need to show that when it actually detects something, it saves at least as many lives. And I doubt that's the case.