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
MRI machines are very expensive, and so is hiring the necessary radiologists/techs to run it and interpret the results (just interpreting the scans takes time, and scans are generally specific to certain body parts/organs so you’d have to do a lot of scans). Also, scans like that will have a false positive rate, meaning it’ll show something that the doctor thinks COULD be an issue, resulting in a rabbit hole of more tests and a lot of patient anxiety, when it may turn out to be nothing after all. This waste of resources and mental distress for the patient is not worth it. It’s better to prescribe MRIs based on symptoms.
Now when someone is actually experiencing chronic pain/illness and typical treatments aren’t helping, doctors SHOULD keep looking for a cause, whether it’s more imaging scans or other procedures. Unfortunately a lot of doctors are overworked, or let their ego get in the way, or their experience/ current medical guidelines lead them down the wrong diagnostic path. But just arbitrarily scanning everyone isn’t going to help with that.
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