All doctors say this, and that sort of drove me away from healthtech. As if there were absolutely no way to take a step in a direction of fixing it.

The faster and earlier we start to scan everyone regularly, as long as scanning methods aren't invasive, the more certainty we'll have what to warn people about and what not to tell them. Perhaps with the regular screening (imaging quarterly, if the scan is fast) you could see what is growing and what isn't.

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poilcn 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Healthcare resources are very limited, you'd overwhelm it with lots of "yeah that's a defect, but 40% have it", things that would go away on its own, false positives, things that do not require urgent intervention, 10x increase of hypochondriacs and health deterioration caused by anxiety

You'd have a system where every resource is allocated for diagnostics, but no medical staff to treat it

Also a significant part of population avoids screening even if they are not required to paid anything from their pocket

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rlt 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Maybe it's not a coincidence an AI company is building this thing...

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moffkalast 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yeah I'm wondering where exactly people think we'd find the millions of additional MRI machines and technicians to run them to make this somehow viable, as if the current ones are not pretty much at 100% capacity at all times.

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dmurray 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

MRI machines cost in the six figures [0], last 10+ years and could reasonably do thousands of full-body scans a year. That's basically free by healthcare standards. Rent for the room to put it in would cost more in most cities.

MRI operators are specially trained technicians, because these are complicated machines. But like, semi trucks and photocopiers are fantastically complicated machines, and we seem to be able to keep a pipeline of people trained to operate and maintain them.

So I don't think there's an economic blocker for giving everyone a full-body MRI scan every year or two.

[0] https://www.blockimaging.com/bid/92623/mri-machine-cost-and-...

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luesterklemme 3 hours ago | parent [-]

What are you reasonably expecting to find in a full body MRI? Besides the notion that a "full body MRI" is not a procedure that is routinely done anyway and lasts upwards of an hour. It's not the scanner that is the limiting economic factor.

	▲	dmurray 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Right. I'm replying to the commentator who questioned how we could possibly purchase and staff enough MRI machines to give people regular full body scans. I'm saying there's no question that would be economically viable. The reason we don't and shouldn't do it is that it wouldn't be medically valuable, even compared to other cheap interventions.

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ben_w 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The website is calling for their full-body MRI-replacing ultrasonic scanners to be so cheap they're part of a spa session.

TBH, this is already a red flag for me, like so many other "tech bro invents X" stories, though I am also aware of stories were "company realises Y is overpriced in medical purchases, makes Y cheaper, finds all hospitals think it is a scam and refuse to buy unless they raise prices".

	▲	zarzavat 33 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Conventional ultrasound scanners are already cheap. Why can't a big ultrasound scanner be cheap too? What makes MRI machines expensive is that they are big helium-cooled superconducting magnets that have to be continuously kept at a few Kelvin.

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mommys_little 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That's the real problem! That healthcare costs are a goldmine for Big Pharma instead of being a cheap and widely available service. And, as someone said before, the huge amount of data it produces, would decrease the rate of false positives to zero in no time! And your arguments about hypochondriacs are very similar to those that were once given against teaching reading to all people!

	▲	nxobject 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> That's the real problem! That healthcare costs are a goldmine for Big Pharma instead of being a cheap and widely available service. I thought we were railing against Big Hospital/Big Insurance here? They'd love a cheap diagnostic.
	▲	3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		[deleted]

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theparanoid 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The targeted scans and tests that we already do offer surprising little benefit.

Mammogram screening based on randomized-trial all-cause mortality, has not shown a measurable reduction in total deaths.

Randomized colonoscopy screening has not shown a statistically significant all-cause mortality reduction.

	▲	zarzavat 21 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> Randomized colonoscopy screening has not shown a statistically significant all-cause mortality reduction. My grandfather went to the doctor complaining of chest pains, they gave him a colonoscopy, and he died of a heart attack a week later! Clearly colonoscopy doesn't reduce mortality! There's no reason for almost any medical intervention to have a statistically significant effect on all cause mortality. That doesn't mean it doesn't have any effect on mortality of individuals.

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KingMob 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's more statisticians saying this, and not doctors per se. You run into issues of signal detection theory, false positives, and the lay confusion that Bayesian P(A|B) !== P(B|A).

You're right that we could take steps to fix it, but unfortunately, those steps involve mass education that every human body has anomalies, and many of those should just be ignored.

We'd get a wave of anxiety, lawsuits, and unnecessary interventions, until humanity collectively internalized this.

	▲	andreareina 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It's also doctors. Medlife Crisis on YouTube, Barbell Medicine, others. BBM have an article on priorities for overall health and they link to a tool maintained by one of the professional bodies on what routine screens to have done and it's pretty conservative. Even my doctor on seeing an "abnormal" lab result said it was likely spurious given my lack of complaints and all the rest of the results. That said they still recommended a follow-up because they kind of have to given professional ethics. BBM (again) made a similar point: resistance training is known to cause liver-associated enzymes (AST, ALT, etc) to rise, that doesn't mean you can ignore a high value. The steps to fixing it is to not take the test that takes you from a prior of 1/100000 to a posterior of 1/1000, because you're going to ignore it anyway. And you can't depend on multiple testing because those test results can be correlated. ETA: I can be convinced that we can collectively get to a place where broader screening would be indicated. But I think it's going to require both of the tests getting better and being better about what we do with (and feel about) the results.
	▲	mnicky 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
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	▲	camillomiller 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		[flagged]

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camillomiller 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This Silicon Valley mentality applied to a mechanistic view of the body is a fucking disgrace. This will fail, and luckily we won’t have to endure more of Silicon Valley’s dunning krueger on steroids about medical solutions. The Silicon Valley has NO CLUE of the complexity of clinical science, yet they hold this populistic view that everything can be foxed with tech and nothing stops the hybris. We all can see where that leads

	▲	nickpp 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Aren't most of the current/latest advancements in health care coming from tech and software?