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lich_king 2 hours ago

No. To argue for the benefit of the procedure, you need to show a difference in outcomes. Not that it can detect something, even if it could (which whole-body MRIs clearly don't). That the detection improves your chances of survival.

If you have an growing mass in your body, then if it's cancer, after a year, it might be too late for treatment. Or it may turn out to be nothing: a benign tumor / cyst / fat deposit in an unusual place. Or it may be slow-growing prostate cancer that you can live with for another 20 years, and maybe it's the chemotherapy that will do you in. It's really not that clear-cut in medicine.

To give you have another example: let's say that the risk of appendicitis in people who have an appendix is 1%. And the risk in people who had an appendix removed is 0%. Does this justify proactively removing the appendix? No, because the consequences of complications are much higher than the harm you're preventing. The same applies here: detection, even if 100% accurate, doesn't mean anything. You need to show that what you do with the result actually helps.

mgraczyk 2 hours ago | parent [-]

The difference in out come is

With my change: 95% of people who are shown scans have cancer and are treated earlier. 5% of people do not have cancer and get CT scans. 0.5% of people get useless biopsies Without my change: many of those 95% die, the 0.5% do not get useless biopsies

And the beauty of this is you can pick the percentage!

> If you have an growing mass in your body, then after a year, it may very well no longer make a difference whether you treat it or not. Or it may be that you would have lived another 20 years just fine

This is just wrong for many parts of the body. In your brain? Your lungs? Growing for a year between 3 scans 6 months apart? Extremely unlikely to be benign

> The same applies here: detection, even if 100% accurate, doesn't mean anything. You need to show that what you do with the result actually helps.

This is wrong. If you had a 100% accurate cancer detector, fewer people would die of cancer with no downside