Comment by ch4s3
12 days ago
I could dump loads of academic research on you about this topic, but it seems like you’re unwilling to engage.
12 days ago
I could dump loads of academic research on you about this topic, but it seems like you’re unwilling to engage.
I read most of the research on this topic. And it's all basically "overdiagnosing".
We had the same story about prostate cancer screening: "overdiagnosing", "people die with prostate cancer but not of prostate cancer", blah blah blah. It turned out that simply adjusting the aggressiveness of follow-up was enough to make prostate cancer result in significantly fewer deaths.
From my point of view: MRI is the ONLY tool that can catch things like pancreatic cancer before it's lethal.
Sure but you have to scale that prostate intervention change across literally everything in every kind of internal medicine. There's just no way to justify the cost of doing this regularly for most people.
Just imagine the same argument, but for bloodwork. You're literally saying: "We didn't have to deal with these pesky MRIs before, so go away".
We will need some additional radiologist training, and the primary care doctors will need to learn when to escalate and/or require followup scans. But that's really about it.
MRIs are _cheap_ these days. The true cost of a scan is around $1000, including the radiologist's reading. They don't have to be reserved as a tool of the last resort.
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