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Comment by prepend | Hacker News Reader

Information’s value is based on the value of decisions made from that information.

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.

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> In the case of body scans, the harm comes from more expensive followups or treatments to rule out false positives.

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.

It’s a problem with getting body 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.

So a potential problem is that they are too low resolution? and that is something specific of full body MRI scans?

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

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