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279 points bookofjoe | 6 comments | | HN request time: 0.618s | source | bottom
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mikert89 ◴[] No.44609276[source]
The big secret is that they could detect cancer very early in most people, but the health care companies don't want to pay for the screening. You can pay out of pocket for these procedures. I was told this by a cancer researcher

EDIT:

Adding these caveats:

1. There is a ton of nuance in the diagnosis, since most people have a small amount of cancer in their blood at all times

2. The screenings are 5-10k + follow up appointments to actually see if its real cancer

3. All in cost then could be much higher per person

4. These tests arent something that are currently produced to be used at mass scale

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1. melling ◴[] No.44609315[source]
Probably not true. It’s much cheaper to catch cancer early than to treat advanced cancer later
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2. mikert89 ◴[] No.44609371[source]
Nope, the cost is 5-10k maybe more, and there is alot of nuance and follow ups to those detections
3. HPsquared ◴[] No.44609376[source]
That's true in the case someone actually does have cancer, but what about paying for all the negative tests?
4. vasco ◴[] No.44609700[source]
Yeah but then you'd go through life having biopsies all the time. If all people did a full body MRI almost everyone would have weird lumps that doctors would have to biopsy to be really sure, and then what do you do? Do you biopsy yourself every time some weird tissue appears? Most of those will be nothing and you'll be going through the complications of surgeries and anesthesia all the time just to always make sure.
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5. rwmj ◴[] No.44609780[source]
Assuming some future MRI technology which was very cheap, wouldn't you have MRIs at fairly regular intervals, to first see if the lump was growing or changing shape? And if this was being done at population scale, you'd train up an AI on the known outcomes, to have it flag up problems for a human to review.
6. cogman10 ◴[] No.44610064[source]
Assuming MRIs weren't exorbitantly expensive, then the answer would probably be to simply rescan a month or 2 later and biopsy the lumps that don't go away.