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Comment by fisherjeff | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. MRI machines are not the bottleneck - we have 3 in my area, serving maybe 100k people. Assuming most people are like me and spend about an hour in an MRI machine every 40 years, we should be at something like 25% utilization, which seems comfortable.

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Thats a pretty big assumption. How old are you? My elderly parents are getting MRIs once or more per year.

They are very common in orthopedic medicine.

Yes. That's probably a bad thing.

from a system cost perspective, absolutely. For specific beneficiaries, not so much, especially after they have aged out of paying into the system. This is a textbook challenge with the US healthcare economy.

Not just from a cost perspective: overuse of imaging, particularly in orthopedic medicine, is apparently a major driver of iatrogenesis in American medicine. It actively does harm.

surely your mean related over treatment or intervention. I am not aware of any adverse health consequences from MRI itself. CT has clear downsides.

That said, there is a pretty big difference between screening and elective medicine.

I don't think the term "elective medicine" means anything useful in this conversation. But, yes: I'm referring to unnecessary surgeries consequent to MRI; a big problem, especially for stuff like knees and spines.

eh, If I have elected to undergo a procedure, I would want the best and most imaging possible.

I dont see data as the problem, but the decision making around it. Preventing the generation of data may be a solution, but I dont care for it as a strategy.

"Elective" medicine is simply medicine that can be scheduled in advance. The opposite of "elective" is "emergency". Plenty of elective procedures are not in any meaningful sense optional.

I feel we are quibbling about terminology instead of the central point. Feel free to substitute discretionary procedures if that is clearer, although nearly all medicine is discretionary (elective or emergency).

Right, I was just clarifying that the term "elective" isn't going to be useful for the conversation we're having.

fair. I was thinking of elective procedures, but that is a poor juxtaposition with screening, which is also elective.

Okay that’s a very surprising number of MRIs…

I’m in my early 40s and have had 1. Everyone I know well has had 1 or (more typically) none, including my parents and in-laws, so I figured ~2 lifetime MRIs would be in the right ballpark

Well apparently there are ~40m MRIs per year in the US, implying around 9-10 lifetime MRIs, which seems... pretty high? It's also wild that, at 85-90m CTs per year, apparently the average person is getting more than 20 lifetime CT scans.

And the distribution is likely heavily skewed in one direction. For example, Medicare recommends and covers annual chest CT for smokers and ex-smokers.

Oh for sure it’s skewed, and it doesn’t surprise me that there are people that will get 20+ CTs. Wild that that’s the average though - the skew must be massive.

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