The real cost of a preventive health scan goes well beyond the price tag
The counterarguments presented in the article are silly. Of course we should have full body scans for preventative purposes. Could you imagine a utopian society where we <i>don’t</i> regularly have full body scans to detect problems early? Any new problems that arise as a result of this trend should be handled as exactly that — new problems.<p>Too many false positives leading to wasted time and costs? Raise the price for the supplemental scans and improve detection precision and recall. Unnecessary procedures that make a benign situation worse? That’s a sign to improve medical research in that area. Too much demand for MRI machines pulling away time from patients that need to use them? Build more MRI machines. This is one of those situations where the ideal end goal seems obvious, and I think we should just plow ahead and address new problems as they arise. In the long run, better preventative medicine will save time, costs, and minimize suffering for everyone. A few road bumps along the way shouldn’t dissuade us from even getting started, otherwise we never will.