Try looking at a full body scan and make that call.
That's vacuously true. The problem is that we humans can't always discern the truth of the situation. Not even doctors.
They perform a lot of unnecessary procedures. It's well known and not a conspiracy. Sometimes they do it to make money. Other times it's so they don't get sued. Scan the comments here and you'll see sentiments of people upset that their doctor didn't do a procedure and blaming them for adverse health problems.
Well, you can do nothing, and just follow it up with repeat scans. Or you can go to surgery. Both cost money and time. But if you have pancreatic cancer, aggressive resection is essentially the only chance of a cure. So both patients and doctors are highly incentivized to go straight to surgery. If it turns out, once the mass has been resected, that it's actually a completely benign tumor, was the procedure really "unnecessary"? Because taking a piece of it and looking at it under a microscope is the only way you'll ever know for sure.
Would you like to try live your life normally with that sword of Damocles hanging over your head? I wouldn't.
That’s how procedures can have negative value.
This isn’t even just the cost of storing and retrieving useless info. Sometimes decisions get harder the more irrelevant information you have.
So it’s better to act on less information than to get more bad information.
In the case of body scans, the harm comes from more expensive followups or treatments to rule out false positives.
Most things that have net value from screenings are already recommended so if it saved lives, it’s usually already recommended until new research changes the calculations.
That's not a problem with body scans, it's a problem with the medical system overreacting to the new information.
Avoiding scans is a distraction from the real problem of the medical system not knowing what to do with the new information of a full-body MRI scans.
I think it’s useful to look at the overall behavior change that happens with a thing.
I mean I guess lung cancer isn’t a problem with cigarettes, it’s a problem with people smoking lots of them.
Body scans don’t provide useful information due to their false positives. Maybe eventually this gets better, or it may be a limitation of this type of scan.
But I’ve talked with many doctors who say that MRI just isn’t actionable enough due to the limitation of imaging.
But for our purposes, full body MRI scans, done without a specific cause, are net harmful and should be avoided.
I mean, it’s legal and people can spend their money on whatever they like. But people spend money on all sorts of unproven “health” expenses. I don’t think MRI scans are as bad as homeopathy, but it’s in that same area.
This, of course, is different from diagnostic scans. MRIs are valuable tools and it’s not the scan is bad, just how they are used sometimes.
I still disagree with the "net harmful" argument if it relies on patient's psychology. People may overreact at first out of ignorance, but we learn to stop worrying after being generally exposed to a new thing