It's a controversial and complicated idea. The downside, and the reason why most doctors do not recommend full body scans, is that every human body is a bit weird and there will almost always be something "wrong" that will be visible in a full body scan. This can lead to unnecessary testing, anxiety, and even unnecessary procedures. Many of these oddities flagged by the scan would never have caused any actual issues had the patient never been aware.
While there are many individual stories of full-body scans detecting early-stage cancer before it became symptomatic, there seems to be a general sense among doctors that implementing full-body scanning on a population level would lead to overall more harm than good. The thinking is that it is better to do regular targeted screenings for diseases that you're in a risk group for (e.g. colonoscopies, mammograms, cancer marker blood tests, etc.) rather than full-body scans.
I'm not a doctor, and I personally do find the idea of full-body scans very appealing, but I also know that if the scan detects a possible cancer, I wouldn't be able to just ignore it if the doctor tells me it's likely ok. Any time I felt any pain or any sort of symptom in that general area, I know I would worry about it. Maybe that's worth it for the potential life-saving results, but it definitely is a cost of this type of scan that needs to be acknowledged.
Exactly - I had switched to a one meal per day setup and have been mostly following it for a few years.
Then after a routine “heart health” check all my indicators were super out of whack - the doctors thought I was on my deathbed - but I am perfectly happy pain free, in shape, physically active person…
Then _i myself_ had to dig into all these tests and figure out that they were measuring the wrong thing - since they try to time where your body is “just about to eat after a fast” - normally for most people in the morning before breakfast, but since my first meal of the day is usually around 20:00 - my body had adopted to have higher levels of various things just to stay on top of my lifestyle choices.
Anyway I had to educate some doctors since they haven’t really had a case like mine, so they weren’t thinking critically of how to interpret the results…
I imagine an automated test _could_ take these things into account with large enough dataset, but it would need to do a lot more reasoning than statistical correlation.
I do believe current sota models should be good enough to come to the correct conclusions with the right harness though.
Reminds me that a few years ago my wifes grandfather (80+) was wondering if he should cut back on the amount of exercise he was doing. He would regularly be knocking on our door at 6am to see if one of us would want to got for a quick 10k run or to hit the gym.
He was a firefighter in NY in his youth and had never stopped exercising even after retirement.
He went to his GP explained his workout routine and was basically told there is no precedent for it as people his age tend to not be running 10km a day. In short he was told if you're not in pain or fatigued keep at it.
I think he's nearly 90 now and has cut back the running to only a day or so a week, but last time we went to visit he was in his garage bench pressing 50kg
Sorry to branch out: How does this one meal per day work for you? There is recommended calories for a person, do you have to follow it somehow to make sure you have enough energy and exercise?
I just eat double portion at dinner, and then nibble on snacks before bed - I haven’t had breakfast in decades, then since I moved to India, with the carby nature of the food it was hard to stay in shape with 2 meals, so I decided to try and skip the lunch too. With fun work it is actually quite easy, and babysitting 4 claudes and helping out colleagues is very entertaining.
Now I either do gym before dinner (heavy exercise) or social dance after.
I’ve been given a lot of advice how I “should” be structuring it - like “don’t eat too much before bed” or “never eat before exercise” … but I haven’t had any issues with what I’m doing so far (~2 years)
One meal ... many snacks?
If the current state is anything to go by, an automated test would not only flag your out of distribution results but try to gaslight everyone reading its output with additional false indicators to map you into an area that's in distribution. Statistical models cannot accept the existence of extremely rare edge cases.
Modern LLMs routinely beat human doctors at diagnosing "extremely rare edge cases".
They have unmatched breadth of knowledge by default, and can maintain attention across entire medical histories.
Citation very much needed.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1iz4iwm/chatgpt_is...
or
https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1oesnix/chatgpt_di...
or if you prefer from this site,
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43171639
and
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42999632
If you were looking for a published paper or something more official though, I don't have one.
Maybe something that isn't completely censored anecdata? At best these fall into "well known diseases with obvious symptoms that overworked, incompetent, or simply sexist, human doctors missed" and not actual rare cases.
> Modern LLMs routinely beat human doctors at diagnosing "extremely rare edge cases".
There is a selection bias here. Not saying it wouldn’t work, but right now you hear about exceptional cases, not when the LLM wants to amputate for a wart.
We all work with LLMs, right? It hasn’t been long at all since an LLM gaslit me while attempting to recover an unbootable laptop. I should have been recommended a few simple steps to try; instead, it was unable to ignore the irrelevant details and led me on an hours-long chase. To me that means the LLM will also struggle to ignore irrelevant medical information.
If the whole population had a full body scan every quarter, the “weird” things would feel more like the noise they are.
But we would have great data over time, both individually (weird tends to only matter if they are changing) and as a population.
Maybe it would end up fine “in the long run” but you cannot ignore the significant issues arising at the beginning (and at each release of a more performant tool): what do you do if you find something that “shouldn't be there".
With enough data, it might change our idea of what shouldn’t be there. Like an appendix. But personalized!
Without clear hypotheses you will have a lot of false positives. Which are quite costly in healthcare.
Overdiagnosis will be a major problem long after we have the data.
It's just hard convince people with a general feeling something's wrong and a specific picture of something wrong that the two are almost certainly unconnected.
The fundamental problem is that you generally can't diagnose simply from shapes. Scans show shapes, shapes cause concern, concern leads to invasive procedures, results are negative.
Are people really going to perform invasive procedures over mere concern if there are no symptoms and the doctor recommends against it?
People take horse dewormer against COVID so yes they will do all kinds of irrational things
Oh we're still doing the "horse dewormer" thing despite 250 million humans taking it each year?
Yes, because it's nonsense and those 250m humans need to get off Twitter.
250M people take it as an anti-parasitic, as they should.
There are numerous comments here from experienced people addressing this. Yes, that happens and a doctor who dismisses the concern can be sued for malpractice if something actually does show up, so they are put in a difficult position. For some reason you just assume that doctors will recommend against an invasive procedure when there is a positive tomography result.
Review the numerous comments that address this as a statistical issue -- which it very much is when talking about the scale that Midjourney is claiming.
It's worse then that unfortunately. Even when invasive tests are positive, and we think we caught a cancer early, we know from population statistics that the reality is that often nothing would have happened. So we don't even truly know how to tell a cancer that will kill you from one won't. And we don't really know what it is that we don't know.
This is more true for some cancers then other though. Prostate, breast, and maybe melanoma are the worst in this regard. This is why prostate and breast cancer screening programmes are controversial, although the needle is swinging towards them being more useful as surgeries and treatments get better. Some other cancers like pancreatic cancer will always kill you eventually, so it's always good to catch them. It's a nuanced problem.
This whole issue is called "overdiagnosis", and personally I used to be obsessed with it. Being aware of it mostly caused a lot of hand wringing and grief, it's just easier to believe that every cancer you catch is a good thing. However, one of the broader issues is that we will never know what we don't know if we don't look. So there exists another perspective that all the suffering caused by overdiagnosis will eventually pay off in the long term. This is the "collect all the data for science/AI" perspective, and I've personally tentatively adopted it myself, although perhaps that's just because it's nicer to believe that you do some good even when you do harm. I think it's more likely that [novel cancer therapies](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10738-7) will solve the "harm" part of treatment before we solve overdiagnosis.
The reality is that important breakthroughs are often entirely unrelated to the data for you are collecting, and even worse that possibly helpful data is locked away due to regulation and never used. This is kinda why I've come to make some kind of peace with private clinics scamming people with whole body MRIs, as I'm sure they're secretly selling the data which might lead to some good. However, they would probably do even more good if they didn't exist so they didn't jack up the prices for MRI machines by inflating demand. The marketing they do is the most morally reprehensible part of the whole deal, as it's usually just lying and creating health anxiety for profit. The fact that midjourney here is marketing themselves in this direction is giving me some serious Theranos vibes. Quick and cheap MRI equivalents would be really useful in the clinic, and it would have to spend a few decades there to prove it is useful before moving on to the "spa" stage. That they are trying to market a render of an idea directly to the wellness crowd firmly puts this in the "scam" folder for me. The fact that midjourney is mostly irrelevant now also fits well with this, making it likely that this is either a marketing stunt or a desperate pivot to get funded. Hopefully there are not that many suckers who will put their VC money down on this loosing bet.
How do you measure the body regularly without potentially introducing problems just by measuring it?
My understanding is that both MRIs and ultrasounds do not introduce problems.
MRIs by themselves no, but depending on what you want to actually see you need to inject a contrast agent which is probably not something you want to do too frequently.
Good point, I was not thinking about MRIs with contrast.
Nobody is proposing this though
> If the whole population had a full body scan every quarter, the “weird” things would feel more like the noise they are.
That's a tautology. We already have quite robust methods for detecting developed anomalies, treating every anomaly below standard human-to-human variation effectively raises the noise floor to already developed anomalies, defeating the purpose of population wide routine scans.
If you think the premise and conclusion of Op's statement form a tautology then you agree with him strongly.
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.
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
Maybe it's not a coincidence an AI company is building this thing...
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.
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-...
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.
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.
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".
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.
As others are saying in these comments, MRI machines themselves aren't particularly expensive machines on a per-scan basis, to the extent the machines themselves are often left underutilised.
But even if you disregard that, there's this:
Other than the structure reading like an AI wrote it, the content also reads like someone who believes in homeopathy and invested in Juicero wrote it. Or hyperloop, where a believer could say paraphrase you and say "Conventional [trains] are already cheap. Why can't a [fast train in a vacuum tube] be cheap too?".Note this does not mean I think the hardware proposed here is totally impossible*. Sure you could make an ultrasound scanner. Why not? But then, hyperloop was always physically possible, just never turned out to be a good idea to actually build**.
* That said, I am suspicious about the claim in the video "Each sensor resolves motions smaller than the width of an atom - not micrometers or nanometers but picometers!", which does sound impossible to me given the movement of atoms is the sense field itself, albeit I'm not an expert in this domain and may just be wrong like how there's weird tricks for photolithography smaller than the wavelength of light used.
** Back when hyperloop was taken seriously and I was still looking for genius behind things Musk said, I thought hyperloop was an excuse to develop here on Earth a transport system that for a Mars colony made more sense than cars and roads (and indeed I still think that, just there's no evidence Musk ever did).
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!
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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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
Aren't most of the current/latest advancements in health care coming from tech and software?
> every human body is a bit weird and there will almost always be something "wrong" that will be visible in a full body scan
Would this be solved by routine scans, so you have a baseline you can compare against? Ignore anything slightly odd in the first scan but monitor for changes over time?
Wouldn't help much.
* Some kind of scans, like CT scans, use ionizing radiation and should not be done too often. * Looking at only imaging scans it is often impossible to tell apart a cancer and a benign growth. (More invasive tests would still be required, which was what the parent posters were warning about)
I think the anodyne to this is - and I admit the degree to which this is indicative of my biases! - more data, especially early on. Getting a good baseline before you have really any significant chance of most cancers to be able to do within-individual diffs, effectively, might be a big deal.
It might also reveal that every MRI shows ghost artifacts a half a dozen times that make it longitudinally useless, of course. I'm not foolish enough to think that epidemiologists haven't thought of this.
One obvious alternative plan, presupposing that Full Body Scan is dirt cheap, is the following protocol:
- At 25 years old or whatever you get a FBS. Pretty much no matter what, this FBS will not be used to do more checks, procedures, and so on.
- ... and now we give you another FBS every so-many years, and only those things that are different from the previous scan are investigated.
There's still an issue with needless procedures, but the amount of 'weirdness that are not going to cause an actual issue had the patient never been aware' is significantly reduced by looking only at changes. i.e. most 'weirdness' shows up early and is fairly stable.
The difficulty is the moral issue. You cannot show that first scan to the patient. Even if every soul agrees beforehand that the rule is that nothing on that first scan, no matter how scary it looks, is further investigated... any medical issues raised by patients are used as a major information input for diagnosing issues. If I show a patient a scan that has this tumor looking thing on the left lung, then no doubt a few months later they'll be back complaining about shortness of breath and a pain on the left side of the torso. The mind is a powerful thing. At that point you can do a scan and see... the same nasty tumor looking thing we saw on that first FSB, and we're right back to the issue of these scans doing more harm than good.
Is it morally acceptable to hide that first scan from the patient?
I think the issue with this and the proposed ‘spa’ scan model is that the diffs are usually meaningless. We all have cysts, masses, and weird shapes that shift around and show up on imaging. Many of these shapes require biopsy to determine what they are. Without symptoms the false positive rate is ridiculously high.
Modern medicine sort of requires us to suspend the idea that we can know everything happening in our body at any given time. If we could develop a diagnostic technique to instantly determine if shapes in our bodies are malignant or benign something like frequent full body scans could be interesting, but they really just introduce noise right now.
> - ... and now we give you another FBS every so-many years, and only those things that are different from the previous scan are investigated.
The diff can be meaningless as well. All sorts of benign things develop with age.
The resolution is the problem. You can't do the type of cytology and histology needed to understand all disease with just scans.
"It's a controversial and complicated idea. "
It is neither controversial nor complicated to detect some cancers by scent.
Taking the "headspace" of something is also not really complicated.
There are people who can reliably smell/detect Parkinson:
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/03/23/8202745...
You gloom on one aspect, the smell. OP focuses instead on full body scans themselves, and the irrelevant issues with everyone's bodies they would highlight.
*glom
That sounds like a problem with applying the wrong threshold for a positive finding, possibly due to liability concerns or wrong goals.
To work, it would have to be incredibly accurate (specifically, have an incredibly low false positive rate).
The question is: If you have enough full body scans of many healthy people, and the statistical tools to model it (beyond "this range is OK"), whether this would reduce these false alarms to an acceptable level.
The real crux of it remains though: Let's say it finds something that increases your death risk by x=0.1%. Could you sleep? I'm not sure. Let's say the operation has 2x=0.2% risk. What do you do? What value of x makes this a problem for you?
You're absolutely right, and I share the frustration.
I'm thinking a possible solution to this signal-to-noise problem is to embrace the longitudinal view: instead of comparing each scan with the normal across the population compare only against past self, unless there's a risk factor that warrants it.
This way we could presumably make use of plentiful scan data and mostly look at the stuff that evolves in suspicious ways, not what looks suspicious.
This always feels like a thinly veiled excuse to ration healthcare. Would these same doctors refuse a full body MRI to a billionaire paying out of pocket?
Anything found can be monitored with focused follow up scans. It doesn't have to be immediately biopsied if it's in a location where that would pose a risk of iatrogenic harm.
At a population level, this would be both extremely time-consuming, and rather expensive.
More generally, no test is perfectly accurate, and for low base rate conditions the vast majority of positive tests will be false positives.
Like, again, as a data person I adore this idea in principle, but there would be a lot of details that we'd need to figure out to make it a reality.
I've heard this argument before and it's always seemed downstream of capacity constraints and the current incentives of the healthcare industry.
There's a reason why billionaires like David Rockefeller, Larry Ellison, and Rupert Murdoch are able to live much longer lives than average, and having an oncall health team (that I'm sure does frequent testing and monitoring) is a big contributor to that.
More testing and data collection doesn't mean that every single anomaly would need to be investigated or communicated with the patient, but would provide a better longitudinal view that can help with disease prevention and health optimization.
A sample size of 3 is hardly statistically significant.
From what I could found, billionaires die on average at ~83 years old. ( https://strygin.substack.com/p/how-billionaires-die )
It's not far off what a decent health care system is able to provide in most wealthy countries. It's even somewhat lower actually.
It's difficult to assess the risk factors, but in the end, I have the feeling their additional medical staff and their ability to "cut the queue" (S. Jobs-style) just barely offsets the additional common risk factors (stress, long hours, segregated life), specially if we compare to the upper-middle class.
In the end, there is no magic $100M pill giving you 10 more years. And in truth, access to food, drinking water, a non-toxic environment and really basic healthcare & medicine (vaccines, antibiotics) probably already brings you at a fairly high life expectancy.
It's obviously a lie to get us to accept no tests due to limited machines. The same as when COVID started masks "didn't help" because they didn't yet secure enough supply for everyone, then when they did, suddenly the masks helped.
Every system that exists as a black box is more understandable with more sensing, not less. Our bodies are not special.
It's also ridiculous that the proposition goes like:
1. Doctor knows some tests will flag tumors or variations that look weird and that we shouldn't then go investigate all of them
2. Doctor shuts off their brain and will then investigate all of them by doing invasive procedures
Just knowing how many such variations there are and if they grow or not is useful information. But the doctors pretend like they are super smart before the test and super dumb right after.
This kind of thinking (that it’s an obvious lie, perpetrated by a cabal) is the sort of superstitious bullshit that is going to jet us all killed. Look up Bayes theorem. As yourself how good a test would have to be if the base rate is low. Wonder what the probability of harm might be if the next advised test was invasive and the patients was anxious because a lump had been detected.
You should read til the end! No cabal, just stupidity and believing other people are stupid instead of telling them the truth and expecting them to act smart based on the information.
Ask yourself, do you think billionnaires have yearly MRIs or that they wait for later because the doctor and themselves will be anxious? It's an argument that treats regular people as stupid.
First, many regular people are “stupid” in the sense that they do get anxious about things that ar slow probability and are not anxious about things that are high probability.
If you are a billionaire you also have a doctor with the time and expertise to properly evaluate the evidence in a Bayesian framework, and you have time to talk to them and understand and implications. That isn’t scalable.
Also, it’s quite likely that billionaires are having lots of unnecessary procedures and that harm is being caused. The mri scans are not the reason they live longer!
Ok but now the argument shifted from "More MRI = bad" to "More MRI = okay as long as doctors do a good job and have enough time". I agree with that. My point was just that it's possible to get to a point where everyone having yearly MRIs is doable because the issue isn't with more information in itself, it's with doctors not having enough time for the patient.
It's not the same doctors saying they themselves are simultaneously smart and stupid. It's "smart" doctors saying that as a point of policy, it is not a good idea for biomedical companies to try to make a buck off of popularizing unnecessary diagnostics, because anxious patients will by chance or by intention find a "dumb" doctor who will agree to perform invasive procedures. (Have you ever heard a tech person say that the tech world has a lot of stupid ideas? It's the same thing.) Look up what happened with South Korea diagnosis vs. mortality rates when they instituted national thyroid screenings in the 90s.
> Every system that exists as a black box is more understandable with more sensing, not less.
With perfect humans in a perfect society, maybe. But such is ignoring the elephants in the room here, from the actual experts on the topic.
So do you think the doctors should hide the data from you so you don’t know anything looks weird, or tell you it looks weird but they don’t think it’s worth investigating it? And do you think the average patient will say “ok that’s fine, I’m not getting a second opinion and if I die my family will sue you into the grave too”?
I believe doctors should tell you the truth and not assume you will do things later that are detrimental with the information as that has a lot of bad consequences.
Case in point, doing that during COVID I think amplified the wave of antivaxxers and medical denialists. Which itself had in my opinion a way worse effect on global health than almost anything else recently because now you have to convince a number of people to trust the medical system again.
All the reasons you’ve listed are excuses why my government healthcare stopped having annual checkups. But to me it’s just worse quality care
>> It's a controversial and complicated idea
sure, and there will be downsides.
But that data will be valuable nonetheless.
Sorry, but that's a morally corrupt idea.
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