4 ms·
A full body MRI earns you a year of smoking
- somat 4mo agoIs the author confusing MRI with a CAT scan? or is there a health risk associated with high flux magnetic fields that I am unfamiliar with. update: The article is second order analysis. need to read it's linked article to understand it is more about the costs(including psychological) of questionable tests and not a direct health risk of MRI devices.
- pqdbr 4mo agoIs the commentator not even opening the article before commenting?
- inigyou 4mo agoExtremely normal on HN.
- yazaddaruvala 4mo agoThe title and intro are badly worded. The conclusion is “you should do MRIs it is equivalently beneficial as all of ___ are bad for you”
- greenpizza13 4mo agoClick the link.
- happytoexplain 4mo agoTry not to respond like this on HN. Better to not respond at all, if this feeling strikes you.
- happytoexplain 4mo agoThe title is confusing without context and it doesn't clarify its meaning for a quite a while. I made the same wrong assumption as you at first. Then, before I made it to the end, I made the same wrong new assumption you made in your update to your comment! (it being about negative second-order effects - it's not) No, what they are saying is that getting an MRI is as good as smoking for a year is bad, using some very fuzzy units of measurement. So getting an MRI "earns" you the reward of being allowed to smoke for a year (the author is being humorous).
- 4by4by4 4mo ago> So the same effort you would expend to get out of those activities [such as one year of smoking] on account of their risk, the same effort you should be willing to expend to get a full-body mri That's the conclusion of the article, which I didn't immediately understand from the title. I read "earns" as a negative reward, not a positive one.
- OutOfHere 4mo agoDeleted.
- jellyroll42 4mo agoPlease look up Bayes' Theorem wrt testing for disease
- OutOfHere 4mo agoDid 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.
- julianeon 4mo agoSince I think people are getting this confused: He's saying that a full body MRI is so valuable, that if you got one and then smoked for a year, you'd be in the same place as you were before you started, health wise. No loss. Obviously you'll come out way ahead if you don't do the smoking part: it's very valuable, in other words.
- atahanacar 4mo ago>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.
- djoldman 4mo agoThe 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"
- mchusma 4mo agoI was similarly confused. Saying a MRI is the equivalent of stopping smoking for 1 year earlier, or driving a motorcycle 10,000km less seems actually really good! Go MRIs! As another point, most of the negative costs of getting full body scans are actually poor reactions to the full body scans. The phrasing is "Hey, if you get more information, we are going to act badly on this information." I think the solution here should be just acting better on the information, not getting less information.
- m463 4mo agoTitle 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html linkbait?
- valleyer 4mo ago> This doesn’t tell me a whole lot, because my intuition for QALYs is weak. How strongly should I prefer an intervention with a net benefit of 0.025 QALYs over other things I might do with my time? No idea! > However! When marketing the effect of global health interventions, a count of 27 qalys is typically considered “a life saved”. A life also happens to be a million micromorts, and I have a much better intuition for micromorts! This came across as unintentionally funny to me. It goes from making the joke that one obscure unit of measure is inscrutable to saying, don't worry, because we can put it in another equally obscure unit of measure!
- thewillowcat 4mo agoThis 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.
- andruby 4mo agoDo you have an example? I don’t know of many diagnosis methods leading to significant injury.
- thewillowcat 4mo agoFor example, many kinds of biopsy can result in serious infection or other surgical complications.
- red-iron-pine 4mo agopresumably if they're seeing a cancer worthy of a biopsy the risk justifies cutting in there and checking yeah there is a risk you get an infection but pancreatic cancer will kill you dead, and is no joke.
- bluGill 4mo agoIs it cancer or just a 'cyst'? I'm not MD but my understanding is we often cannot tell without the biopsy but mostly it isn't cancer. Of course this is a generic discussion which could go either way depending on where they find something.
- LorenPechtel 4mo agoDoesn't need to be significant injury from every incident. My wife had an MRI, incidental find on it caused a PET CT scan.
- hn_user82179 4mo agoMy guess is unnecessary surgeries which isn't an unreasonable concern. Something like 40% of MRIs showing spinal disc herniation are asymptomatic and the rate of surgeries to fix can be a coinflip.
- guluarte 4mo ago2 base jumps? are those really that dangerous?
- andruby 4mo agoI am surprised that spending a day on the Ukraine front is equivalent to _only_ a year of smoking. That seems to clash either the average life expectancy I read about Russians on the front-line (being measured in hours)
- bluGill 4mo agoThe Ukraine side has much better survival rates. I still wouldn't want to be there, but if I was forced to choose.
- rambojohnson 4mo agodogshit title.
- mchusma 4mo agoI like the linked Scott Alexander post, but I also genuinely wonder what is the rate of change on these tests? The linked test Prenuvo has competition from Ezra + Function and others. It this drops from $2k to $500 over time, it makes it look considerably better. The more we can use different testing modalities, we should be able to reduce false positives in each modality. I will say, that for cancer specifically, tests like Galleri seem better, but as that cost comes down I could see in 5-10 years an annual $500 scan that offers a full body scan of some kind, plus comprehensive bloodwork including blood cancer screening, and the type of thing that could be done annually by many in the US.
- deepsun 4mo agoOk, what should I say to my doctor to order the full-body MRI scan? (Sorry I don't have an MRI machine at home).
- 1shooner 4mo agoWhat is the 'QALY' value of the peace of mind coming from a clean bill of health?