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
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.
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