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Comment by Tepix | Hacker News Reader

How many lives did those CT scans save vs. how many lives were lost due to the additional cancer cases they caused? That's the question, isn't it?

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Well actually let’s find out whether they do cause it or not. Patients ought to know the risks beforehand if so. The calculation as to net benefit can be done later.

X-ray radiation causes cancer.

CT scanners don’t use magic non-carcinogenic x-rays.

Socrates is a man, men are mortal, Socrates is mortal.

We have the technology. We should have moved on to MRIs for nearly all scans years ago.

They're not interchangeable. CT scans have better resolution, take significantly less time, and are generally sensitive to different things.

You’re absolutely right, they’re not interchangeable. MRIs are better suited for soft tissues.

If you’re looking for a broken bone, take a single x-ray image instead of a whole CT scan, which is a far higher dose of X-ray radiation.

Largely agree, but still very much depends on what you're screening for. For example, my oncologist still recommends CT over MRI for post-surgical screening as the increased resolution makes it possible to detect tumors a bit earlier.

I’m not familiar with the parameters of the machines readily available to your provider, but I can say that the risk/reward scenario for an intervention for someone coming out of cancer surgery is distinct. We give cancer patients chemo and radiation that we would never give to someone who just showed up in the ER or was still undergoing preliminary diagnostics.

I mean you can't when a non-insignificant amount of people have magnetic metal in their body.

Please elaborate?

People get weird when using math to calculate human lives.

As they should. It’s not difficult to use questionable math to justify very awful things.

You can very easily come up with reasonable plans to euthanise sub categories of the population to "save" lives if you only care about the total numbers of people surviving...

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