I’ve seen so many horror stories where someone gets sick or is in pain, thinking they know what’s causing it only to find out they have late stage cancer. I don’t understand…..wouldn’t insurance companies want to offer this like they would a free yearly physical as it would be cheaper for them than paying out cancer treatments? Wouldn’t doctors want to push they’re patients to have this service done?
In: Biology
If a medical test provides a false positive 1% of the time but the real prevalence of the issue is .01% of the population, then you have 99 patients unnecessarily freaking out and consuming medical resources for each case that the test catches.
Availabilitymoneytime.
I live in a city of about 150,000 people. There’s 1 hospital.
A yearly full body MRI for everyone would be amazing, but that’s an extra 400 full body MRI’s **per day** for the hospital to do. It’s already operating near max capacity now, doing a fraction of that. All on people that very specifically need one!
You’d need to build, equip, staff, and operate like 5 more MRI units the size.of the one we’ve got, just for everyone’s precautionary scans. That’s a ton of money, equipment, and expertise to spend on scans that are mostly coming back finding nothing.
Basically: even if your region *did* have the budget to triple their total healthcare spending, 10s of thousands of MRIs is not the best way they could spend it on healthcare.
That would be ideal, but really isn’t feasible. MRI’s are expensive. Like the machine itself is $1m. The power and room improvements needed to house one is going to be $100k or more. And they can only do something like 20 scans per day per machine. So you’d need like 10-20x the machines.
But the larger problem is the radiologist workload. It’s a decent bit of work to look at a localized area for a specific concern. It’s 100x the work to look over the whole body for a host of random issues. Remember, cancer isn’t one disease with one way it shows up; it’s hundreds of different diseases that show up in a myriad of ways. Between the increased number of MRI’s and the increased scope of the scan, we’d need something like 1000x the radiologists that we have.
In the early 2000s, there were a lot of ads on the radio for full body scans like the ones you’re asking about. It turned out that there was a lot of scummy, fraudulent stuff going on with those companies, and people were getting a scan, then were being told they needed treatments they didn’t actually need. I imagine that has a lot to do with it.
MRI’s take a lot of time. I worked as an imaging assistant at the hospital for many years. The MRI machine was in use 24/7 for the most part. That’s just for people who actually need it. Scans take longer than people realize. So if we wanted to make it possible we’d need more machines, and more techs to run with scans which are usually the high or second highest paid a Radiology-tech can do, plus playing the radiologist to read the scans themselves, and the energy to run the machine and computers. Would cost insane amounts per year.
Alternatively people could get CT’s scans because of how fast they scan. However same issue of cost, and it would be crazy amounts of unnecessary radiation.
The cost/time/workload is part of it, and well explained in other answers, but as someone who currently gets a CT scan and X-ray every two months, the tests themselves have associated health risks. The more you take them, the greater your risk of developing various cancers.
They have to weigh the cost of the information provided vs the risks to your long term health. I’m on active monitoring for cancer, so for me, the risk of not catching a reccurance early is worth the long term risks, which I will eventually have to face just the same.
Because there aren’t enough doctors to do basic care for people already. At least in my country. Really this is a thing that we should be using to provide jobs for people as automation takes many of them away
Radiologist here. This is not actually how MRIs work, and a common misunderstanding of the modality.
MRIs are highly specialized exams with different scanning protocol for EACH body part. For example, even an MRI cervical spine (the bones in your neck) is different than an MRI soft tissue neck. MRI Liver is different than MRI Kidney. You could attempt to do a broad, catch-all study that tries to include the most useful parameters, but then you run into resolution and field of view issues. Full body MRI is actually offered as a boutique pay-out-of-pocket service in certain countries, but it often creates more questions than it answers, and the patient likely would have to go back to re-image the body part in question just to get the right sequences and evaluate it properly. All of which may end up in it being something totally medically irrelevant or incidental. All in all, on top of a lot of things already mentioned by other commenters, the cost to the system is not worth it.
MRIs are not risk free. X-rays can cause cancer – but the risk on a one-off MRI is low, and the benefits if diagnosing an illness more than worth the risk. But MRI the entire population every year, and you’d be causing quite a lit of cancers.
Another is that a MRI can detect something unusual, but cannot diagnose it as a cancer. That is done by invasive surgery to take a biopsy. Again, extra risk. You’d subject lots of people to unnecessary surgery.
And that’s before you even consider cost.
There isn’t a net benefit to doing it. They may find the occasional cancer earlier than otherwise but they will also find a lot of abnormalities that will turn out not to be cancer or anything else important. Procedures to determine that have risk to patients and have a cost. It’s also both quite costly in itself and not really possible. A full body scan takes a long time so to give everyone one each year will take far more very expensive machines and expensive radiologists, nurses and technicians than it’s possible to obtain.
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