Is 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: had to read the linked article to understand it is more about the costs(including psychological) of questionable tests and not a direct health risk of MRI devices.
> 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.
The article is nonsense. If you follow its logic, you should never even stand on a weighing scale. A full body MRI is valuable to do annually if you have the spare cash for it, in the same way as blood tests. If nothing else, it could give you a clear baseline for future comparison.
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. They're the same people who will ask you to not supplement vitamin D3.
In any case, people like you will get others killed. Like I said, 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 die. Refer to DOI: 10.1016/S2352-3018(26)00109-8.
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.
>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.
The big-medicine industrial complex in this context is not the insurance firm, whether public or private. It is the biomedical firms that are developing expensive new treatments costing five, six, or seven digit dollars per patient per year, and these firms very much would prefer if you didn't take steps to catch conditions early or prevent them cheaply.
Those firms have no say over which treatments are preferred on which patients in single-payer health systems. Actually, it is the exact opposite. When there is a single payer, they can haggle on behalf of the entire population so they have huge leverage over the treatment costs. The government can simply say "You either sell at the price that I want, or lose access to the entire market in this country.". That's why American drugs can be 10-100x more expensive than the rest of the world.
Their employees are here on this site too, downvoting preventative care and anything that grants health at a low cost to individuals. The corresponding gatekeeper organizations like the Endocrine Society do their best to disinform the people.
The 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.
I 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.
> 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!
This 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.
I 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)
I 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.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 37.0 ms ] threadupdate: had to read the linked article to understand it is more about the costs(including psychological) of questionable tests and not a direct health risk of MRI devices.
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.
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. They're the same people who will ask you to not supplement vitamin D3.
In any case, people like you will get others killed. Like I said, 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 die. Refer to DOI: 10.1016/S2352-3018(26)00109-8.
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.
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.
> 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"
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.
Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait
- https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
linkbait?
> 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!
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.