[wkoszek]

All doctors say this, and that sort of drove me away from healthtech. As if there were absolutely no way to take a step in a direction of fixing it.

The faster and earlier we start to scan everyone regularly, as long as scanning methods aren't invasive, the more certainty we'll have what to warn people about and what not to tell them. Perhaps with the regular screening (imaging quarterly, if the scan is fast) you could see what is growing and what isn't.

[poilcn]

Healthcare resources are very limited, you'd overwhelm it with lots of "yeah that's a defect, but 40% have it", things that would go away on its own, false positives, things that do not require urgent intervention, 10x increase of hypochondriacs and health deterioration caused by anxiety

You'd have a system where every resource is allocated for diagnostics, but no medical staff to treat it

Also a significant part of population avoids screening even if they are not required to paid anything from their pocket

[moffkalast]

Yeah I'm wondering where exactly people think we'd find the millions of additional MRI machines and technicians to run them to make this somehow viable, as if the current ones are not pretty much at 100% capacity at all times.

[dmurray]

MRI machines cost in the six figures [0], last 10+ years and could reasonably do thousands of full-body scans a year. That's basically free by healthcare standards. Rent for the room to put it in would cost more in most cities.

MRI operators are specially trained technicians, because these are complicated machines. But like, semi trucks and photocopiers are fantastically complicated machines, and we seem to be able to keep a pipeline of people trained to operate and maintain them.

So I don't think there's an economic blocker for giving everyone a full-body MRI scan every year or two.

[0] https://www.blockimaging.com/bid/92623/mri-machine-cost-and-...

[luesterklemme]

What are you reasonably expecting to find in a full body MRI? Besides the notion that a "full body MRI" is not a procedure that is routinely done anyway and lasts upwards of an hour. It's not the scanner that is the limiting economic factor.

[dmurray]

Right. I'm replying to the commentator who questioned how we could possibly purchase and staff enough MRI machines to give people regular full body scans.

I'm saying there's no question that would be economically viable. The reason we don't and shouldn't do it is that it wouldn't be medically valuable, even compared to other cheap interventions.

[ben_w]

The website is calling for their full-body MRI-replacing ultrasonic scanners to be so cheap they're part of a spa session.

TBH, this is already a red flag for me, like so many other "tech bro invents X" stories, though I am also aware of stories were "company realises Y is overpriced in medical purchases, makes Y cheaper, finds all hospitals think it is a scam and refuse to buy unless they raise prices".

[zarzavat]

Conventional ultrasound scanners are already cheap. Why can't a big ultrasound scanner be cheap too?

What makes MRI machines expensive is that they are big helium-cooled superconducting magnets that have to be continuously kept at a few Kelvin.

[ben_w]

As others are saying in these comments, MRI machines themselves aren't particularly expensive machines on a per-scan basis, to the extent the machines themselves are often left underutilised.

But even if you disregard that, there's this:

  It starts by stepping into a shallow pool of golden light. You then begin to descend into the water. Your body passes through a ring of underwater sensors, each acting like a dolphin, using its echolocation. The sensors send ultrasonic sound waves through your body from every angle. With enough waves, and enough angles, we form an image of what's happening inside your body.

  The goal is for this process to take no more than 60 seconds.

  You go into the water, you come out of the water, and you're done.

Other than the structure reading like an AI wrote it, the content also reads like someone who believes in homeopathy and invested in Juicero wrote it. Or hyperloop, where a believer could say paraphrase you and say "Conventional [trains] are already cheap. Why can't a [fast train in a vacuum tube] be cheap too?".

Note this does not mean I think the hardware proposed here is totally impossible*. Sure you could make an ultrasound scanner. Why not? But then, hyperloop was always physically possible, just never turned out to be a good idea to actually build**.

* That said, I am suspicious about the claim in the video "Each sensor resolves motions smaller than the width of an atom - not micrometers or nanometers but picometers!", which does sound impossible to me given the movement of atoms is the sense field itself, albeit I'm not an expert in this domain and may just be wrong like how there's weird tricks for photolithography smaller than the wavelength of light used.

** Back when hyperloop was taken seriously and I was still looking for genius behind things Musk said, I thought hyperloop was an excuse to develop here on Earth a transport system that for a Mars colony made more sense than cars and roads (and indeed I still think that, just there's no evidence Musk ever did).

[rlt]

Maybe it's not a coincidence an AI company is building this thing...

[mommys_little]

That's the real problem! That healthcare costs are a goldmine for Big Pharma instead of being a cheap and widely available service. And, as someone said before, the huge amount of data it produces, would decrease the rate of false positives to zero in no time! And your arguments about hypochondriacs are very similar to those that were once given against teaching reading to all people!

[nxobject]

> That's the real problem! That healthcare costs are a goldmine for Big Pharma instead of being a cheap and widely available service.

I thought we were railing against Big Hospital/Big Insurance here? They'd love a cheap diagnostic.

[KingMob]

It's more statisticians saying this, and not doctors per se. You run into issues of signal detection theory, false positives, and the lay confusion that Bayesian P(A|B) !== P(B|A).

You're right that we could take steps to fix it, but unfortunately, those steps involve mass education that every human body has anomalies, and many of those should just be ignored.

We'd get a wave of anxiety, lawsuits, and unnecessary interventions, until humanity collectively internalized this.

[andreareina]

It's also doctors. Medlife Crisis on YouTube, Barbell Medicine, others. BBM have an article on priorities for overall health and they link to a tool maintained by one of the professional bodies on what routine screens to have done and it's pretty conservative. Even my doctor on seeing an "abnormal" lab result said it was likely spurious given my lack of complaints and all the rest of the results. That said they still recommended a follow-up because they kind of have to given professional ethics. BBM (again) made a similar point: resistance training is known to cause liver-associated enzymes (AST, ALT, etc) to rise, that doesn't mean you can ignore a high value.

The steps to fixing it is to not take the test that takes you from a prior of 1/100000 to a posterior of 1/1000, because you're going to ignore it anyway. And you can't depend on multiple testing because those test results can be correlated.

ETA: I can be convinced that we can collectively get to a place where broader screening would be indicated. But I think it's going to require both of the tests getting better and being better about what we do with (and feel about) the results.

[theparanoid]

The targeted scans and tests that we already do offer surprising little benefit.

Mammogram screening based on randomized-trial all-cause mortality, has not shown a measurable reduction in total deaths.

Randomized colonoscopy screening has not shown a statistically significant all-cause mortality reduction.

[zarzavat]

> Randomized colonoscopy screening has not shown a statistically significant all-cause mortality reduction.

My grandfather went to the doctor complaining of chest pains, they gave him a colonoscopy, and he died of a heart attack a week later! Clearly colonoscopy doesn't reduce mortality!

There's no reason for almost any medical intervention to have a statistically significant effect on all cause mortality. That doesn't mean it doesn't have any effect on mortality of individuals.

[camillomiller]

This Silicon Valley mentality applied to a mechanistic view of the body is a fucking disgrace. This will fail, and luckily we won’t have to endure more of Silicon Valley’s dunning krueger on steroids about medical solutions. The Silicon Valley has NO CLUE of the complexity of clinical science, yet they hold this populistic view that everything can be foxed with tech and nothing stops the hybris. We all can see where that leads

[nickpp]

Aren't most of the current/latest advancements in health care coming from tech and software?