3 ms·

All doctors say this, and that sort of drove me away from healthtech. As if there were absolutely no way to take a step in a direction of fixing it. The faster

by wkoszek 4mo ago

All doctors say this, and that sort of drove me away from healthtech. As if there were absolutely no way to take a step in a direction of fixing it. The faster and earlier we start to scan everyone regularly, as long as scanning methods aren't invasive, the more certainty we'll have what to warn people about and what not to tell them. Perhaps with the regular screening (imaging quarterly, if the scan is fast) you could see what is growing and what isn't.

poilcn 4mo ago
Healthcare resources are very limited, you'd overwhelm it with lots of "yeah that's a defect, but 40% have it", things that would go away on its own, false positives, things that do not require urgent intervention, 10x increase of hypochondriacs and health deterioration caused by anxiety You'd have a system where every resource is allocated for diagnostics, but no medical staff to treat it Also a significant part of population avoids screening even if they are not required to paid anything from their pocket
- rlt 4mo ago
  Maybe it's not a coincidence an AI company is building this thing...
- mommys_little 4mo ago
  That's the real problem! That healthcare costs are a goldmine for Big Pharma instead of being a cheap and widely available service. And, as someone said before, the huge amount of data it produces, would decrease the rate of false positives to zero in no time! And your arguments about hypochondriacs are very similar to those that were once given against teaching reading to all people!
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
  - nxobject 4mo ago
    > That's the real problem! That healthcare costs are a goldmine for Big Pharma instead of being a cheap and widely available service. I thought we were railing against Big Hospital/Big Insurance here? They'd love a cheap diagnostic.
- moffkalast 4mo ago
  Yeah I'm wondering where exactly people think we'd find the millions of additional MRI machines and technicians to run them to make this somehow viable, as if the current ones are not pretty much at 100% capacity at all times.
  - dmurray 4mo ago
    MRI machines cost in the six figures [0], last 10+ years and could reasonably do thousands of full-body scans a year. That's basically free by healthcare standards. Rent for the room to put it in would cost more in most cities. MRI operators are specially trained technicians, because these are complicated machines. But like, semi trucks and photocopiers are fantastically complicated machines, and we seem to be able to keep a pipeline of people trained to operate and maintain them. So I don't think there's an economic blocker for giving everyone a full-body MRI scan every year or two. [0] https://www.blockimaging.com/bid/92623/mri-machine-cost-and-price-guide https://www.blockimaging.com/bid/92623/mri-machine-cost-and-...
    - luesterklemme 4mo ago
      What are you reasonably expecting to find in a full body MRI? Besides the notion that a "full body MRI" is not a procedure that is routinely done anyway and lasts upwards of an hour. It's not the scanner that is the limiting economic factor.
      - dmurray 4mo ago
        Right. I'm replying to the commentator who questioned how we could possibly purchase and staff enough MRI machines to give people regular full body scans. I'm saying there's no question that would be economically viable. The reason we don't and shouldn't do it is that it wouldn't be medically valuable, even compared to other cheap interventions.
  - ben_w 4mo ago
    The website is calling for their full-body MRI-replacing ultrasonic scanners to be so cheap they're part of a spa session. TBH, this is already a red flag for me, like so many other "tech bro invents X" stories, though I am also aware of stories were "company realises Y is overpriced in medical purchases, makes Y cheaper, finds all hospitals think it is a scam and refuse to buy unless they raise prices".
theparanoid 4mo ago
The targeted scans and tests that we already do offer surprising little benefit. Mammogram screening based on randomized-trial all-cause mortality, has not shown a measurable reduction in total deaths. Randomized colonoscopy screening has not shown a statistically significant all-cause mortality reduction.
- zarzavat 4mo ago
  > Randomized colonoscopy screening has not shown a statistically significant all-cause mortality reduction. My grandfather went to the doctor complaining of chest pains, they gave him a colonoscopy, and he died of a heart attack a week later! Clearly colonoscopy doesn't reduce mortality! There's no reason for almost any medical intervention to have a statistically significant effect on all cause mortality. That doesn't mean it doesn't have any effect on mortality of individuals.
KingMob 4mo ago
It's more statisticians saying this, and not doctors per se. You run into issues of signal detection theory, false positives, and the lay confusion that Bayesian P(A|B) !== P(B|A). You're right that we could take steps to fix it, but unfortunately, those steps involve mass education that every human body has anomalies, and many of those should just be ignored. We'd get a wave of anxiety, lawsuits, and unnecessary interventions, until humanity collectively internalized this.
- mnicky 4mo ago
  [dead]
- camillomiller 4mo ago
  [flagged]
- andreareina 4mo ago
  It's also doctors. Medlife Crisis on YouTube, Barbell Medicine, others. BBM have an article on priorities for overall health and they link to a tool maintained by one of the professional bodies on what routine screens to have done and it's pretty conservative. Even my doctor on seeing an "abnormal" lab result said it was likely spurious given my lack of complaints and all the rest of the results. That said they still recommended a follow-up because they kind of have to given professional ethics. BBM (again) made a similar point: resistance training is known to cause liver-associated enzymes (AST, ALT, etc) to rise, that doesn't mean you can ignore a high value. The steps to fixing it is to not take the test that takes you from a prior of 1/100000 to a posterior of 1/1000, because you're going to ignore it anyway. And you can't depend on multiple testing because those test results can be correlated. ETA: I can be convinced that we can collectively get to a place where broader screening would be indicated. But I think it's going to require both of the tests getting better and being better about what we do with (and feel about) the results.
camillomiller 4mo ago
This Silicon Valley mentality applied to a mechanistic view of the body is a fucking disgrace. This will fail, and luckily we won’t have to endure more of Silicon Valley’s dunning krueger on steroids about medical solutions. The Silicon Valley has NO CLUE of the complexity of clinical science, yet they hold this populistic view that everything can be foxed with tech and nothing stops the hybris. We all can see where that leads
- nickpp 4mo ago
  Aren't most of the current/latest advancements in health care coming from tech and software?

by wkoszek 4mo ago

poilcn 4mo ago

Healthcare resources are very limited, you'd overwhelm it with lots of "yeah that's a defect, but 40% have it", things that would go away on its own, false positives, things that do not require urgent intervention, 10x increase of hypochondriacs and health deterioration caused by anxiety You'd have a system where every resource is allocated for diagnostics, but no medical staff to treat it Also a significant part of population avoids screening even if they are not required to paid anything from their pocket

rlt 4mo ago
Maybe it's not a coincidence an AI company is building this thing...
mommys_little 4mo ago
That's the real problem! That healthcare costs are a goldmine for Big Pharma instead of being a cheap and widely available service. And, as someone said before, the huge amount of data it produces, would decrease the rate of false positives to zero in no time! And your arguments about hypochondriacs are very similar to those that were once given against teaching reading to all people!
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- nxobject 4mo ago
  > That's the real problem! That healthcare costs are a goldmine for Big Pharma instead of being a cheap and widely available service. I thought we were railing against Big Hospital/Big Insurance here? They'd love a cheap diagnostic.
moffkalast 4mo ago
Yeah I'm wondering where exactly people think we'd find the millions of additional MRI machines and technicians to run them to make this somehow viable, as if the current ones are not pretty much at 100% capacity at all times.
- dmurray 4mo ago
  MRI machines cost in the six figures [0], last 10+ years and could reasonably do thousands of full-body scans a year. That's basically free by healthcare standards. Rent for the room to put it in would cost more in most cities. MRI operators are specially trained technicians, because these are complicated machines. But like, semi trucks and photocopiers are fantastically complicated machines, and we seem to be able to keep a pipeline of people trained to operate and maintain them. So I don't think there's an economic blocker for giving everyone a full-body MRI scan every year or two. [0] https://www.blockimaging.com/bid/92623/mri-machine-cost-and-price-guide https://www.blockimaging.com/bid/92623/mri-machine-cost-and-...
  - luesterklemme 4mo ago
    What are you reasonably expecting to find in a full body MRI? Besides the notion that a "full body MRI" is not a procedure that is routinely done anyway and lasts upwards of an hour. It's not the scanner that is the limiting economic factor.
    - dmurray 4mo ago
      Right. I'm replying to the commentator who questioned how we could possibly purchase and staff enough MRI machines to give people regular full body scans. I'm saying there's no question that would be economically viable. The reason we don't and shouldn't do it is that it wouldn't be medically valuable, even compared to other cheap interventions.
- ben_w 4mo ago
  The website is calling for their full-body MRI-replacing ultrasonic scanners to be so cheap they're part of a spa session. TBH, this is already a red flag for me, like so many other "tech bro invents X" stories, though I am also aware of stories were "company realises Y is overpriced in medical purchases, makes Y cheaper, finds all hospitals think it is a scam and refuse to buy unless they raise prices".

theparanoid 4mo ago

The targeted scans and tests that we already do offer surprising little benefit. Mammogram screening based on randomized-trial all-cause mortality, has not shown a measurable reduction in total deaths. Randomized colonoscopy screening has not shown a statistically significant all-cause mortality reduction.

zarzavat 4mo ago
> Randomized colonoscopy screening has not shown a statistically significant all-cause mortality reduction. My grandfather went to the doctor complaining of chest pains, they gave him a colonoscopy, and he died of a heart attack a week later! Clearly colonoscopy doesn't reduce mortality! There's no reason for almost any medical intervention to have a statistically significant effect on all cause mortality. That doesn't mean it doesn't have any effect on mortality of individuals.

KingMob 4mo ago

It's more statisticians saying this, and not doctors per se. You run into issues of signal detection theory, false positives, and the lay confusion that Bayesian P(A|B) !== P(B|A). You're right that we could take steps to fix it, but unfortunately, those steps involve mass education that every human body has anomalies, and many of those should just be ignored. We'd get a wave of anxiety, lawsuits, and unnecessary interventions, until humanity collectively internalized this.

mnicky 4mo ago
[dead]
camillomiller 4mo ago
[flagged]
andreareina 4mo ago
It's also doctors. Medlife Crisis on YouTube, Barbell Medicine, others. BBM have an article on priorities for overall health and they link to a tool maintained by one of the professional bodies on what routine screens to have done and it's pretty conservative. Even my doctor on seeing an "abnormal" lab result said it was likely spurious given my lack of complaints and all the rest of the results. That said they still recommended a follow-up because they kind of have to given professional ethics. BBM (again) made a similar point: resistance training is known to cause liver-associated enzymes (AST, ALT, etc) to rise, that doesn't mean you can ignore a high value. The steps to fixing it is to not take the test that takes you from a prior of 1/100000 to a posterior of 1/1000, because you're going to ignore it anyway. And you can't depend on multiple testing because those test results can be correlated. ETA: I can be convinced that we can collectively get to a place where broader screening would be indicated. But I think it's going to require both of the tests getting better and being better about what we do with (and feel about) the results.

camillomiller 4mo ago

This Silicon Valley mentality applied to a mechanistic view of the body is a fucking disgrace. This will fail, and luckily we won’t have to endure more of Silicon Valley’s dunning krueger on steroids about medical solutions. The Silicon Valley has NO CLUE of the complexity of clinical science, yet they hold this populistic view that everything can be foxed with tech and nothing stops the hybris. We all can see where that leads

nickpp 4mo ago
Aren't most of the current/latest advancements in health care coming from tech and software?