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.
Cancer often will kill you quicker than a year. So it’s essentially a huge waste of resources that might catch 1% more cancers in time to treat them that would have otherwise been fatal. Not to mention a full body MRI takes several hours of being stuck in a tiny, uncomfortable box. There are a lot of people, even without claustrophobia, who would really prefer to never do that.
The US has a grand total of 32-ish MRIs per million people. Most of those are in highly developed cities, and. that’s on the higher end; most countries have fewer than that. We literally don’t have enough machines on earth to even attempt that.
Plus, the false positives would be absolutely insane; enough that doing this would waste a significant amount of medical resources on making people think they’re gonna die (and possibly administering treatments that may cause the problems they’re trying to solve.)
That’s going to increase the workload on the MRI techs and the radiologists since there’s only so many MRIs in a given area. It’s just more feasible to get an MRI if your doctors feel like there’s a substantial risk for a tumor. You’re also going to have a few follow ups as well
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