Comment by Apes
5 days ago
> An MRI is great at identifying which ways your body doesn’t look like a textbook reference body, but it doesn’t necessarily tell you what those things are or whether they will ever cause you problems.
Its the doctors doing this, not the MRI.
There's this weird definition switch that always happens with the "overdiagnosis" defense where the information gets blamed for the overdiagnosis. An MRI doesn't provide any diagnosis in any sense of the definition. A doctor does.
Claiming an overdiagnosis defense is essentually implying the medical industry is worse for most than doing nothing.
Yeah, any doctor worth their salt is going to be diagnosing you based off of the MRI results and some other evidence.
But in the scenarios this article is talking about (Prenuvo, et al), these aren’t scans ordered by a doctor, and there is no other evidence. It is just a patient getting some MRI findings of unknown clinical significance dumped in their lap.
The problem isn’t an overdiagnosis by doctors. The problem is that there’s no doctor diagnosing anything in these instances.