Right, the problem in your model is that the doctors do! I am pointing out that this is a problem with the doctors, not the scan.

Scans are a tool, doctors are not allowed to use them rationally because it would be too expensive, so they don't use them. With an ideal doctor, patient outcomes would be better with a scan than without one, but my claim is that doctors are not ideal.

No doctor would order a full body MRI just to throw out the result in 99% of cases, because *it's too costly*

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tptacek 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Doctors are not ordering biopsies to salvage the value of a scan they just ordered.

	▲	mgraczyk 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I agree, but they are failing to order scans when the probability of finding anything worth biopsying is low because of cost. This is so obvious it's crazy, our entire world view is misshaped around saving money. When you walk into a doctor's office, why do they take your blood pressure and temperature? Why do they look at the back of your throat and listen to you breath? These are all diagnostic procedures with extremely high false positive rates. The reason doctors do these but do not do MRIs is because MRIs are expensive. If MRIs were free you would get one automatically every time you go to the doctor.