It is in fact very probably a bad idea. A good search term here is "incidentaloma". The balance of evidence currently appears to suggest that full body scans for asymptomatic patients are a net negative for health.
It is in fact very probably a bad idea. A good search term here is "incidentaloma". The balance of evidence currently appears to suggest that full body scans for asymptomatic patients are a net negative for health.
How brainwashed by the healthcare machine do you have to be to think that catching asymptomatic medical issues is a bad thing? The argument against is literally:
- patients will worry too much, and - it will cost time and money to investigate.
Both spurious rationales cooked up by an industry that is at least as hostile to humanity as it is helpful.
>The argument against is literally:
- patients will worry too much, and - it will cost time and money to investigate.
you forgot one more, which is subjecting people to potentially risky procedures for things that were not a health risk in the first place.
Yes, it's the healthcare industry's fault, they're brainwashing me into not getting more procedures. Sounds very plausible.
Insurance companies dislike paying for procedures instead of passively collecting premiums. Not sure how you missed that.
Exposing asymptomatic potential issues leads to medical care that often does not meet out standards for medical tradeoffs. Chemo is nasty, even the most minor surgery has risks. We endure the risks because we are addressing either major health issues or other dire uncertainties. Using our heavy duty treatments for issues without any symptoms at all would, normally, cause the patient suffering in excess of what would be justified. Chemo is a life saver when it's saving lives -- if the alternative is no symptoms, it just ruins your life for a profoundly uncertain upside.
Those claims are extremely suspect and completely support the current rationing and power structure of healthcare.
But, even granting they could be true, they would be true under the status quo.
Sure, a one off full body scan might be scary and lead to unnecessary action. But if a technology of the sort being described here were to exist, you would just get daily (or more frequent) scans to monitor the situation. Is that tumor actually growing or is it just a transient thing your immune system is dealing with? Way easier to tell if imaging is cheap, fast, and frequent.
And then there is the data.
No one knows what is actually going on in our bodies. If we had the ability to do billions of scans, imagine the longitudinal studies that could be performed.
It would radically alter medicine.
couldn't it be different when scanning becomes very cheap and quick and it's the delta over n scans that gives signal?
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