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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

I guess you're planning to never need an MRI?

Not planning on one, no. People have made it through low Tesla MRIs with only a bit of discomfort, though I'm not sure if that's a risk I'm willing to take.

Chances are I'll be able to discuss it with the technician or get it removed prior.

If it were me, i would get a tattoo above the location saying that there is removable material underneath, and get it added to you medical records. There probably should be a way to tattoo a universal message for the medical profession [1], i.e. 'do not resuscitate', 'allergic to X', 'metal under skin here', etc. There are relatively universal signs for magnets for example [2].

[1] https://www.health4you.co.za/directory/category/tattoos/medi...

[2] https://openclipart.org/detail/281487/magnets-warning-symbol

The author mentions MRI in the article.

most people never need one

Not sure. According to this there are 40M given a year in the US,

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38021512/

which is about 1 in 9 people. If those scans were evenly distributed everyone would get several in a lifetime although there is probably a Pareto thing going on to the effect that "20% of people get 80% of the scans".

It's pretty routine for common soft tissue injuries. My son got a minor injury at work and had a Workman's Comp claim and got his knee scanned (puts a bound on liability I guess); I got my knee scanned because I'd had patello-femoral pain for a while and wanted to try steroid injections (didn't stick with it, my wife has given steroid injections to numerous horses, she tells me it helps in the short term but not the long term) Like my scan his scan came back with "degenerative changes consistent with your age".

It may be a waste in most cases

https://www.mymosh.com/spine/mri-for-back-pain-be-careful-wh...

I'm not sure that's true. I can't think of a single person I know over 35 that hasn't had one at some point. I'm an edge case for MRIs (I've had well over a dozen, maybe even two dozen), but I had to get one for a badly sprained ankle and that's a relatively common injury.

it's me, the opposite anecdote, no one I know has had one

I'm not suggesting it's definitively wrong based on my anecdote, I am just speculating that it might not be true and that it's hard to avoid injuries in life requiring MRI. Do you actually have discussions around medical issues affecting you or the people you know? I do, quite often. What is their demographic? I said over 35, which is the demographic I associate with; these people typically have a slew of injuries and medical problems accumulated over the decades, making it more likely for them to having used an MRI machine.

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