Comment by matwood
11 days ago
> MRIs are great for certain things like herniated disks in your back.
I have had a lot of experience with MRIs on both myself (back and knee [1]) and my dogs with herniated discs. The doctors always make it sound like MRIs are great to confirm what's suspected because of other symptoms like pain, but a point in time MRI alone is not that valuable. Everyone's bodies (including animals!) are surprisingly different inside making normal be somewhat unique. I think what would be interesting is if scanning technology like MRIs could be made so inexpensive and easy that everyone had one done 4x/year. That way it's the differential being checked and I'm guessing it would be way more valuable. Normalization such as this could also lower anxiety around findings.
[1] Even when I tore my ACL the MRI came back only as probable.
Do you know which MRI you used? Not all are equal. Most MRI are 1.5T powered, and you can’t get fine details until you hit 3T. And there are differences even in the 3T power range. There are higher powered MRI which are mostly only used in research, whilst it is a bit scary thinking about the sheer power of them but a 7T machine doing a full scan of you, would be guaranteed nearly to find anything wrong with you.
When I last looked the full body scans for sale seemed to used 1.5T setup, which seems like a waste. The 3T advanced scans looks much more detailed, but it just depends on where you live - I couldn’t find any around.
My knee and back was years ago, so probably the 1.5T. No idea on my dogs who have had the more recent MRIs. Their scans are incredibly detailed though, so maybe the 3T?