[louden]

In medicine, there are physically harmless tests that can still cause harm. Full body scans are one of them. If something is found, it will likely have an emotional impact on the patient. Not all people are equally rational. Not all people have a good grasp of the statistical nature of the findings. That applies to educated people and medical professionals who deal with this stuff everyday.

My point was not that either side was correct but rather that a simple statement like "more data is always better" is not as simple as they seem to think it is. Those of us who work in this field deal with balancing the risks as best we can so that we can detect the marginal elevated risk of something in a way so that the benefit outweighs the costs (financial, physical and emotional).

[Brakenshire]

It’s perfectly reasonable not to use such a test if medical science doesn’t have strong evidence what the data means. Likely that sort of statistical evidence would require institutions with teams of researchers managing and adjusting screening campaigns rather than the judgement of an individual doctor anyway. I really can’t accept the idea though that any test which is safe, cost and time effective, and produces actionable data shouldn’t be undertaken on the basis of some other judgment of emotional state. Doctors are in no way competent to make such judgements about individuals, and even accepting the premise on the scale of population, it means pandering to ignorance and in so doing damaging people’s health. You might as well limit vaccination programmes because of anti-vaccination PR campaigns.

[louden]

You are comparing a program where the benefits vastly outweigh the cost to a program where the benefit is mostly speculative and the cost known.

The cost of full body imaging is not just in the scan itself but in the procedures that follow it that require anasthesia (non-zero chance of killing the patient), cause pain and may cause secondary infection. In fact, just being in the hospital or doctors office to get the procedure has a non-zero risk to due to the concentration of sick people there.

[Brakenshire]

I agree in the sense that this appears to be the reality of the situation at the moment, that the benefit is speculative because of a lack of evidence for the effectiveness of either the data or our ability to interpret it. I highly doubt that will be the case in the long run, as costs come down, resolution goes up, and analysis software improves.