A full-body MRI can reveal hidden killers. Do we want to know?

My wife had a small spinal tumor a few years ago. Detecting it required MRI with a contrast agent. Prior to the MRI, she was misdiagnosed several times. The MRI saved her from a wheelchair or worse. It was to the point where she couldn't walk far at all. The clump of nerve tissue was pressuring the spinal nerve. More than you wanted to know. But the fact is, this is an extremely rare occurrence of unknown origin. I am very thankful that she was referred to a specialist who recognized the need for MRI, and to the insurance that paid some of the costs.

On the other hand, general whole body imaging technologies can reveal the wear and tear of simple aging, and when the results are interpreted by specialists, it's very easy to get caught in a doom loop. As in, "now I screwed up my spine, look at all of that degeneration" - and this can trigger sensations of pain where no pain was previously noticed. It's a fact that most whose imaging results indicate a potential very painful condition feel little or no pain. But, some can begin feeling pain when they think something's wrong. So this kind of scenario needs to be addressed. Which is why folks like Dr. Amen will say that sometimes, it's all in your head. And if you have a reason to think that you're in pain, your head can invent an excuse to make you feel it.

All of that said.... the cost needs to come down. Get some competition in there. Of course, as patents expire, this will be inevitable. But whole body imaging by MRI is a lot safer than scans involving high energy radiation.

"The real cost of a preventive health scan goes well beyond the price tag" (Aug 25, 2023, 261 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37266189

I’d say the practice of medicine is extremely primitive, and therefore shockingly sophisticated.

Imagine debugging a program with an architecture utterly alien to your intelligence, and a poorly understood highly nondeterministic instruction set.

Oh, and

- No core dumps. Very limited logging. And the most human-readable log functions have the disclaimer “everybody lies.”

- It’s persistent and distributed

- You cannot stop it or step it, and…

- You’re debugging running production code and if you break prod someone dies a painful death

I’m excited. We’re finally getting basic debuggers! Imagine what can be done!