How often do full-body MRIs find cancer?

Re:How often do full-body MRIs find cancer? by kcexn on Sunday February 15, 2026 @04:59AM (#47022487)

There's a softer component to healthcare which is that people can overreact to medical results. If a doctor administers a scan, finds a handful of likely benign things but wants to administer another scan later on down the line, I'm probably much more likely to look for a second opinion that tells me to cut them out (even if it may not be medically necessary) than trust my doctor that "it's probably fine".

It's probably more accurate to use a software analogy about performance metrics. We measure random request spikes now and again that strain the system. It's probably fine, but later on down the line, something could change that results in an outage during one of these spikes. Do we proactively fix the problem even if no change is expected? Or do we wait till there is definitely a problem before taking action?

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Re:How often do full-body MRIs find cancer? by munksbeer on Sunday February 15, 2026 @05:32AM (#47022664)

But surely this would decrease as we learned more from more frequent MRI scanning. Doctors and patients would be less likely to overreact, and we'd settle in on something better?

I'm not an expert though.

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Re:How often do full-body MRIs find cancer? by MagicMoonlight on Sunday February 15, 2026 @05:31AM (#47022663)

No, this is more like disabling logging because people are concerned the server is going down.

“Don’t worry about it, I don’t think it’s a real issue so we’re just going to ignore it”

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Re:How often do full-body MRIs find cancer? by JackFr on Sunday February 15, 2026 @06:39AM (#47022955)

But if you’ve never looked at the log before all these WARNINGs might be normal operation. It’s not turning off logging, it’s saying log at ERROR level.

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Re:How often do full-body MRIs find cancer? by Bender on Sunday February 15, 2026 @09:39AM (#47024038)

That's a good point. How many people have a baseline MRI from when they were at their healthiest?

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Re:How often do full-body MRIs find cancer? by xanrah on Sunday February 15, 2026 @04:58PM (#47028055)

And if everyone had scans at their healthiest we would know better

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Re:How often do full-body MRIs find cancer? by n8henrie on Sunday February 15, 2026 @09:31AM (#47023977)

Not to mention the malpractice risk and potential for extra income, which -- depending on where you live -- may strongly (if subconsciously) influence your physicians interpretations and recommendations.

Do you think a doctor is more likely to call something "possible cancer" and recommend that you either have a specialist do a biopsy (keeping in mind that many of these will be... hard to reach) or at least have a follow up MRI in 3, 6, 9 months?

Or tell you it's "pretty unlikely to be cancer, I don't think we need to worry about it" and then get sued for 20M when they are wrong about 1 in 100 cases (not to mention missing out on all the potential income from above).

At least in the US, the incentives here are grossly misaligned.

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Re:How often do full-body MRIs find cancer? by masterlee_fn on Sunday February 15, 2026 @02:19PM (#47026546)

Incentives shape behavior in every industry, including medicine. Systems drive outcomes.

That is exactly why builders focus on owning aligned systems, not depending on broken ones. More on this at foundniche.com

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