Because if a "condition" doesn't impact you, will it help to be aware of it? Over treatment can be a real problem. You dont want to take medisine you dont need, or spend much time in a hospital if there is no net positive outcome.
Because if a "condition" doesn't impact you, will it help to be aware of it? Over treatment can be a real problem. You dont want to take medisine you dont need, or spend much time in a hospital if there is no net positive outcome.
> Over treatment can be a real problem.
Indeed, but having more data might be able to solve that? The whole problem seems to be that benign conditions sometimes look scary because we're currently not able to predict well enough whether it's something that will eventually cause problems.
For me?
If I could have daily full 3d body scans, and time lapse healing, track injury progress, visualize and correlate food and exercise.
And all I have to do is chill out about known benign cysts and tumors.
Yes I think it will help. I would take that trade off.
I already can feel a few cysts that have been with me for a long time, docs said I was fine, so I've already been through the stressful initiation of benign lumps.
You won’t know they are benign unless you plan on a biopsy or surgery for every finding. It’s exactly this reason why we only regularly scan people that have say, known cancer.
They'll know whether they're getting bigger or not. Pretty much the same for if you have a lump just under your skin that you can see and feel but this would allow you to see the ones further inside. So you just have to take the same attitude and advice towards them that a doctor would give you about the surface level lumps. What's the difference?
And for what? Is it just morbid curiosity or is there something you plan to do with that information.
It’s right there in their second line
But from what this says, it's not accurate enough to determine benign vs cancerous lumps
Just to add to this. My heart pumps blood in a known but different way than normal. I know because, to practice sports in my home country, it is required to undergo a specific checkup that includes an ECG. However, despite doing that visit many times, only two doctors ever mentioned this condition. The reason is that it causes no issue at all, so they just don't want to worry people for nothing by telling them their heart is pumping in a different way than most other people.
I would rather know that than have the information hidden from me. It's also not hard to imagine a scenario where such quirks are harmless on their own, but might be relevant in the future or for reasons the doctor is missing. I guess it's true some people would panic at any sort of quirk they find, but I find that frustrating as someone that doesn't think that way.
Further, as someone that has spent far too much time and money trying to find the root cause of a particular issue (with absurdly frustrating inefficiencies in terms of being bounced around, insurance nonsense, etc), I am generally in favor of improving our ability to find a lot of information in a manner like this. Doctors are generally good at finding very common issues they see all the time, much worse at anything uncommon. This can be a real problem. I think it could help the world a lot if we had something like this to improve our understanding of more outlier cases, we might find a lot of issues that were hard to catch without that scale of information. I also think preemptive scanning would catch a lot of issues that go otherwise unnoticed for much longer than they should go, something that also happened to me, but is mostly an issue of systemic inefficiencies in our current healthcare system rather than something that this technology is required to solve. In my case, doing some simple checks that they felt weren't necessary because I seemed healthy would've caught it much earlier.
> I think it could help the world a lot if we had something like this to improve our understanding of more outlier cases
Was this presented as an opportunity for researchers to be able to run more large scale studies involving full scans I woukd have a different take. This is however presented as a shiny toy to be put in a spa, that gives you images you don't know how to interpret anyway, or at best gives you some AI-powered report.
The rest that you're saying points more to issues of you country's Healthcare system, and it isn't clear if and how this technology would improve that.
> Because if a "condition" doesn't impact you, will it help to be aware of it?
Fast and cheap full body scans could provide the data necessary to tune out the noise.