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Comment by NickC25 | Hacker News Reader

I don't see anything unnecessary about getting full body scans, especially if one has a family history of a given disease or aliment.

If I'm predisposed for ________, and I find out really early, to the point where I might be able to fight (some of) it with lifestyle changes, why not?

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Why not? Because of the well known, widely understood problem of iatrogenic harms. Your conclusion does not follow from your premise. If you have a predisposition to a particular disease, get screened FOR THAT specific thing. Getting a full body scan just opens you up to unnecessary psychological distress, unnecessary treatments, and unnecessary healthcare costs for many things which would have never affected you in the slightest had you avoided getting a full body scan. Do you REALLY want to know that you have an aneurysm that only has a 1/100 chance of rupturing, when you would've otherwise gone your entire life without ever worrying about whether tonight will be the night that it ruptures and you won't wake up tomorrow? Do you really want to know that you have a slow growing cancer that would only affect you when you're already less 12 months from your ultimate death at age 92, but instead you got invasive life-altering surgery at age 65 because it just happened to show up on a scan? If we had instant, easy cures for every disease, then yes, get a full body scan - unfortunately this just isn't the case, and the harms greatly outweigh the benefits.

What I take from your arguments is that medicine is a full shit-show.

Don't blame the full-body scan if you think the medical system is the real problem

The full body scan would be part of the problem, because it's not always clear what medicine should do given a specific finding on a scan, and decisions made on the basis of the scan would then lead to potential harms, as I outlined above. Why advocate for scans that would cause net harm?

If an MRI scan is truly practically harmless, and its only consequence is the information you get from it, then it's not the MRI who is causing the harm, but our own response to it

"Avoiding MRI scans" as a solution is a hack, you are trapped in a local minima solving the problem very indirectly. I may be willing to accept it as a temporarily pragmatic solution because solving our medical system may be very hard and bureaucratic

But, according to your arguments, the real problem then would be how we react to the results of a scan. Whether it is how patients react to them, or how the medical system reacts.

If full-body scan only informs, then do not kill the messenger!

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