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Silicon Valley's quest to live forever now includes $2,500 full-body MRIs
- Animats 3y ago200 scans and the machine is paid for.[1] Which is under two months of use. The problem here is retail markup, not machine cost. [1] https://info.blockimaging.com/bid/92623/mri-machine-cost-and-price-guide https://info.blockimaging.com/bid/92623/mri-machine-cost-and...
- jxramos 3y agoWhat’s the turn around time for a full body scan these days anyways? 1hr? More ? Less ?
- pazimzadeh 3y agoI think the bottleneck is that a doctor has to look at it. And when you don't have any particular symptoms it is hard to put as much effort into checking every millimeter of the body
- vinay_ys 3y agoWe had advanced image processing techniques to detect tumors almost 20 years ago. With more advancements in computing power and AI techniques, it should be so much quicker and easier to do the same. The AI need not be conclusive but it could be a great assist to a radiologist who is looking at the scans.
- MattGaiser 3y agoIs the capital cost of the machine the expensive part of an MRI? The cost of many medical procedures is more about the staff than the equipment.
- spondylosaurus 3y agoMRIs use helium, which ain't cheap, although truthfully I don't know if the helium runs dry fast or if you can use the same helium supply indefinitely.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- iancmceachern 3y agoThe helium is one of the lowest cost parts of an MRI machine. There is a big heavy spinning magnet that spins around your whole body at like 50 rpm. It's not an easy thing to make.
- modeless 3y agoMRI machines don't spin. You are thinking of CT scanners.
- ta988 3y agoYou are not talking about an MRI, nor a CT. Magnet is fixed in an MRI and you just pulse fields in the XYZ directions to create gradients of magnetic field. The pulse emission and receiving antennas are fixed too. In a CT scan, what is rotating is one or many xray sources and one or many detectors plus some electronics and cooling systems if needed. PET scans have fixed rings of pairs of detectors. But they can also be combined with a CT in the same instrument.
- iancmceachern 3y agoThanks, my bad. Revising my point to be that phasing those fields and controlling the power, is expensive and complicated
- ta988 3y agoAll of that is included in the initial price of the machine. There is no real cost associated when running the machine itself (outside of when a preamp or pulse generator burns but that's rare).
- jjeaff 3y agoDoes this take into account the high maintenance cost and running costs of an MRI? my understanding is that they have to run 24x7x365.
- vinay_ys 3y agowhy do they have to run continuously? I would expect the opposite to be true. It would have some cool-off periods etc.
- tonymillion 3y agoConsidering they’re superconductors cooled by liquid helium there’s not a lot of scope for “cool-off” lol
- ramraj07 3y agoMRIs use superconducting coils which can never be shutdown except in emergencies. There's a "quench" button which if you press the magnet turns off. But then I can't remember how much it is to turn back on but it's not a simple visit from a mechanic.
- q1w2 3y agoTo be clear, the coolant system runs continuously, but the power draw of the machine is far lower when not being actively used.
- MattGaiser 3y agoCompared to the young person blood mentioned in the article or the exotic ingredients from “blue zones”, this stuff seems exceedingly mundane.
- panosfilianos 3y agofwiw most ingredients in blue zones are much more mudane.
- 15457345234 3y agomundane*
- 15457345234 3y ago[dead]
- strken 3y agoI had a CT scan of a fracture taken when I was a child, and doctors coincidentally discovered a tumour. My mum discovered she had breast cancer through a routine mammogram. Early detection of growths is great because it saves lives and lets patients get treatment when it's more effective. The framing of expanded early detection as "Silicon Valley's quest to live forever" seems uncharitable.
- iancmceachern 3y agoAgreed. I'm not really things like that tech bro who goes to great lengths to reduce aging, but regular diagnostic screenings, like mri, save lives. Additionally, MRI doesn't have the radiation side effects that other forms of imaging do
- epicureanideal 3y ago> The framing of expanded early detection as "Silicon Valley's quest to live forever" seems uncharitable. Totally agree. Also, we should be encouraging those with the means to spend on medical technology! It'll bring down the cost for everyone over time.
- hnboringman 3y ago[flagged]
- ackbar03 3y agoIsn't there a saying that the benefits of regular checkup are a myth? Since they lead to over intervention or something? I know some places encourage regular health checkups whilst other places actually actively say it's a bad idea. Any doctor can chime in on this?
- q1w2 3y agoIt's too broad of a statement. Take a look at individual tests to see if they make sense. A PSA urine test, for example, is insanely cheap and catches many expensive prostate cancers in early stages. Mammograms are the similar (less cheap, but still life saving). For those specific tests, the evidence is clear.
- iancmceachern 3y agoWhat strikes me, looking through their "conditions" page, is that they have many conditions listed that I'm not really concerned about. Like noticing if I'm missing a kidney, I'm good on that. But I do want to know if I have a brain tumor, because lots of that in my family. It's odd, I don't see brain tumor listed, but these things that are not much of a concern are. Am I missing something?
- JumpCrisscross 3y agoWhen LK-99 was a possible room-temperature superconductor, among the first use cases people pointed to were cheaper, more-available MRIs. I can’t begrudge anyone with the means who decides to do this. And the demand has value. When was the last time a non-incumbent took a top-down look at reducing an MRI machine’s cost?
- ValentineC 3y agoThere was a similar discussion just over a year ago [1], and I was shocked then to find out that India offers full-body MRIs for probably 20% of the price. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31446568 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31446568
- ta988 3y agoOnce amortized, The cost (outside of normal cryogenics resupply) is mainly the one of the personnel running it so a factor of 1/5 doesn't seem too surprising to me between India and US. I'm sure the overcharge from the hospital or clinic is not negligible either.
- vinay_ys 3y agoIf you want to your mind blown, see the charges for these complex procedures related to heart at one the world's best government run hospitals. https://jayadevacardiology.com/procedure_charges.html https://jayadevacardiology.com/procedure_charges.html
- httpz 3y agoOne of the reasons why people get excited about room temperature superconductor is because it can make MRI imaging very cheap. Currently cooling the superconductors in the MRI machine is a significant part of the cost.
- kbos87 3y agoI looked into a full body scan about a year ago after hearing from someone I trust that they had one done. While I didn’t end up moving forward with one, I was struck by how weak the arguments against having one done were. They amounted to: - There’s a strong chance you’ll be sent on a wild goose chase or two after seeing something on the scan that is meaningless - They only find something that actually turns out to be concerning in a small percentage of people - This isn’t a cost effective approach to early diagnosis for most people I’m sorry, but if I’m at a place in my life where this is a reasonable expense, even 1% odds such a scan turns up something genuinely troublesome is very worth it. It’s a life we are talking about.
- vinay_ys 3y agoOut of curiosity, why didn't you go for it?
- arcticbull 3y ago> I’m sorry, but if I’m at a place in my life where this is a reasonable expense, even 1% odds such a scan turns up something genuinely troublesome is very worth it. That's actually not how diagnostic tests work. Because of Bayes theorem, tests that have a high likelihood of returning a positive result in a high-incidence population are totally useless when applied to asymptomatic random people in the general public. Your likelihood of being harmed by one of these wild goose chases exceeds the chance that an early diagnosis will help you. First, you don't know there's a 1% chance that it'll turn something up - you don't know the chance at all. And you also don't know the likelihood and magnitude of harm chasing down false positives. That's why we don't test people randomly for things they likely don't have. It's just a logical fallacy and cognitive bias to think that doing something, anything, is better than doing nothing. Often that isn't the case. > It’s a life we are talking about. Which is why we shouldn't let our biases pull us in unhelpful directions.
- miiiiiike 3y agoNo one says you have to follow up with anything invasive. I know someone who had a sinus polyp turn up on an MRI. Knowing what it was let him live with the symptoms it was causing without fearing that it was something much worse. I don't think he ever got it removed. If you don't have symptoms and a scan showed an incidental something, you don't have to act. Personally, I'd rather know. And, if something does go wrong in the future you can say "I have an X in my left Y." Might give the doctor a place to start debugging.
- miiiiiike 3y ago$2,500 sounds like a bargain. I had to fight an insurance company to get someone an MRI of their head.. With insurance it came out to $2,100.
- achiang 3y agoFull body scans are a common preventative measure in Taiwan. My parents (expats, living in the US for over 50 years) flew back and got routine scans (MRI, PET, CT) in February for about $1000 USD total. Similar to this story, they found a tumor on my dad's pancreas. A biopsy confirmed it, and he had surgery in August. They caught it at stage I. We're very lucky. The latency from February til August was entirely convincing the US medical system to take his Taiwanese images seriously. They finally gave up and went back to Taiwan to get the procedure done. I'm getting older myself and will absolutely be paying for any sort of imaging available. This should be more broadly available to everyone. I'd be happy for more of my tax dollars to go to preventative care rather than rear guard action.
- DoreenMichele 3y agoThe problem I have with this is not the scan per se but the fact that it's just more pressure to treat patients like a specimen in a petri dish rather than a product of their environment. Dr. McCoy's tricorder was kind of a vision of tech enhancing the old fashioned "doctor making house calls with a little black bag" idea. Reality: Tech has created increased pressure for patients to travel to the medical facility rather than care coming to them. One side effect: Doctors who don't do house calls can't incidentally notice things about your lifestyle that may contribute to the problem and may not know to ask or may not ask because it's an offensive thing to say and you may not know to volunteer the info. (If you knew, you might just fix it without seeing a doctor.) I remember a scene from some TV show that made a powerful impression on me in my youth where the doctor burns a fur after seeing several patients. I think he realized it was a tick borne illness and the bear skin (iirc) was the source (of ticks). It came very out of left field for me, but I've seen stories that suggest this is in part how medicine used to operate -- by the doctor noticing and fixing the cause of the problem in some cases -- and mostly doesn't anymore. Now we go in for drugs and surgeries and for some people that just means the start of an endless nightmare of chronic illness while doctors question their mental health and imply they are hypochondriacs.