3 ms·
None of those things are necessary most of the time, and they’re usually just going to make you paranoid. It’s why doctors don’t generally like to do full-body
by MajimasEyepatch 2y ago
None of those things are necessary most of the time, and they’re usually just going to make you paranoid. It’s why doctors don’t generally like to do full-body scans on healthy people: they’re rarely going to find anything clinically significant, but they’re often going to find something that causes a scare and some unnecessary tests. (And if the scan is a CT scan, on average, the radiation may cause more cancers than it catches if you’re scanning healthy people for no reason.)
If you want to have the best shot at preventing disease and living a long, healthy life, it’s not complicated: eat a healthy diet, exercise, get a good night’s sleep, avoid drugs and alcohol, and have fulfilling relationships with other people. Beyond that, you’re spending a lot of money on things that are going to have a negligible or even negative impact on your health and quality of life.
- wordpad25 2y agoPeople in high risk categories are warranted to go further than that
- MajimasEyepatch 2y agoSure, but most people are by definition not high risk.
- sersi 2y agoI did a CT scan recently for something unrelated which found some soft tissue lesion in the thymus. Cue doctors trying to tell me that I should just remove the thymus since it's not possible to do a biopsy and anyway the thymus is useless. Read recent research in NJEM that shows that removing the thymus increases risks of getting cancer and that it's anything but benign. Eventually, I did a PET scan, got second opinions (that think it's most likely hyperplasia), determined that given the result of the PET scan, I don't have carcinoma or anything that is likely to be fast progressing. So, I won't operate, I will do regular MRIs to check the progress and monitor that it's not anything. All this to say, that yes, having that result mostly caused additional stress for something that is actually likely to have already been there for years and years.
- carimura 2y agoUnderstanding the results does take education, I agree with that, but having more data over time seems much better than flying blind and then being surprised when something actually does happen.
- sadcherry 2y agoIf getting that extra data imposes a risk (eg. radiation) then the tradeoff is not so simple.
- carimura 2y agoya agree there. but most of those things aren't tradeoffs, aside from a bit of time and money (both of which go back to my original point about why I think the system is not working)