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Either that or driving up healthcare costs significantly as those 5000 people are going to need an MRI or CAT scan or something else to rule out cancer.
An MRI without contrast has no impact. An MRI with contrast has relatively little impact. A biopsy would only be done if the MRI with contrast lit up areas of concern. At the point a PET is ordered, you have narrowed the false positive pool substantially and probably want the scan no matter what.
I think its related to a genetic disorder that causes me to retain high levels of iron, but I have nothing to back this up.
This discomfort in the MRI comes in the form of waves of warmth I feel throughout my abdomen. Its mostly annoying/distracting and not painful. The loudness of the MRI is far worse than the slight warming I feel. Less annoying than the pee your pants feel of a CT with contrast.
Just looking at myself, I feel a great level of distress over other, less serious, variations of uncertainty. Having been told I might have cancer, and then not getting to know for certain this very instant would be nothing short of nerve-wracking...
That's why you have to enter the patient weight and size before scanning, in order to keep the SAR within acceptable values and limit body heating.
See https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-much-ct-scans... for a jumping off point into this type of research.
Looks like I may have been misrepresenting the risk to some patients; also looks like i've probably caused around 4 cases of cancer
This kind of analysis has been done, most memorably for breast cancer screening. The conclusion I recall was that it did more harm than good a few years ago (opportunity cost of unnecessary spending, pain and complications of biopsy, unnecessary mastectomy, psychological damage, etc. etc.). The follow-up tests and analysis also have an error rate and no treatment is zero cost.
It might only be 1 or 2 people out of 5,000, but those 5,000 were perfectly healthy and never had cancer to start with.
