Re:How often do full-body MRIs find cancer?
by kube-system on Sunday February 15, 2026 @12:15PM
(#47025432)
Yeah, but in the scenarios this article is talking about (Prenuvo, et al), these aren’t scans ordered by a doctor.
The scans are unprompted and ordered by the patient themselves. And they cost a lot of money so the patient is going to be interested in whatever the findings are. Now, of course a doctor understands that most of these findings are probably not clinically significant. But, for a patient it will prompt a lot of questions, because a layperson by definition doesn’t know whether the findings are significant or not.
MRIs are very useful as a diagnosis tool, but they’re not a diagnosis machine. That’s why they are the standard of care for accurately diagnosing conditions for which there are some other indications of. But the signal to noise ratio of MRI findings alone, aren’t good enough to be the standard of care for diagnosing anything.
The scans are unprompted and ordered by the patient themselves. And they cost a lot of money so the patient is going to be interested in whatever the findings are. Now, of course a doctor understands that most of these findings are probably not clinically significant. But, for a patient it will prompt a lot of questions, because a layperson by definition doesn’t know whether the findings are significant or not.
MRIs are very useful as a diagnosis tool, but they’re not a diagnosis machine. That’s why they are the standard of care for accurately diagnosing conditions for which there are some other indications of. But the signal to noise ratio of MRI findings alone, aren’t good enough to be the standard of care for diagnosing anything.