[thewillowcat]

This doesn't seem to account for the outcome that someone receives testing and treatment for a problem found by the MRI, and is injured in the process, despite the fact that non-treatment would have been harmless; a not-uncommon outcome in the real world.

[andruby]

Do you have an example? I don’t know of many diagnosis methods leading to significant injury.

[SoftTalker]

Things such as a needless biopsy of healthy tissue, leading to an infection and sepsis.

A colonoscopy perforating the bowel and leading to an infection and sepsis.

These things happen, they are not common but they are not zero-chance events either.

And you have to consider the opportunity costs of consuming the doctor's time, the labwork, and the facilities, possibly delaying treatment for someone else who actually needs it.

[aeternum]

Yes it would be better if it took these into account but doing so would not change the overall numbers.

Risk of perforation is something like .03% and almost never fatal whereas a colonoscopy reduces colorectal cancer mortality by 60-70%.

>And you have to consider the opportunity costs of consuming the doctor's time, the labwork, and the facilities, possibly delaying treatment for someone else who actually needs it.

That is also rarely true. More often, greater demand for a service soon yields economies of scale, more efficiencies and overall more patients served at a lower price. Low volume is expensive, high volume is cheap.

[hn_user82179]

My guess is unnecessary surgeries which isn't an unreasonable concern. Something like 40% of MRIs showing spinal disc herniation are asymptomatic and the rate of surgeries to fix can be a coinflip.

[bluGill]

Having a diagnosis doesn't mean we have to treat. If we find something minor with no symptoms we can ignore it. However there are things with minor symptoms people ignore to their harm. I wish I had my MRI a decade sooner, but the symptoms were the same thing everyone else has that is self treatable and comes and goes over time. When it finally got bad enough that I demanded help the normal help didn't work and only then did they find something major and rare.

[LorenPechtel]

Doesn't need to be significant injury from every incident.

My wife had an MRI, incidental find on it caused a PET CT scan.

[thewillowcat]

For example, many kinds of biopsy can result in serious infection or other surgical complications.

[red-iron-pine]

presumably if they're seeing a cancer worthy of a biopsy the risk justifies cutting in there and checking

yeah there is a risk you get an infection but pancreatic cancer will kill you dead, and is no joke.

[bluGill]

Is it cancer or just a 'cyst'? I'm not MD but my understanding is we often cannot tell without the biopsy but mostly it isn't cancer. Of course this is a generic discussion which could go either way depending on where they find something.