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
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.
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