The orange site’s two sole objections to full-body MRI scanning is “b-b-but base rate fallacy and iatrogenic harm!!1″ Which in conjunction boil down to “if you see something weird in there, you’re going to put yourself through hell getting biopsies and fail to produce a conclusive result”. Gatekeeping by witch-doctors, effectively. “Only we can figure out when it’s appropriate to give you a test!” Given the failures of the Medical Establishment over the last decade on everything from honest communication around CV-19 and its complete cooption by the business and industry of medicine, is it any surprise that ordinary folks are beginning to realize they need to advocate for their own treatment? Given the endless stories of women with serious medical issues brushed off by the systematic misogyny of Western Medicine’s refusal to consider specifically female challenges as anything but symptoms of the menstrual cycle, why would anyone continue to put stock in the practice at scale? Given how many people, regardless of gender, are shoved out of specialists offices with diagnoses of idiopathy, and who then have to advocate aggressively for themselves is it any wonder that everyone is now biased to think and advocate for themselves?!

Sniping at the medical establishment aside, you can find a few references to “baseline” on the linked comment thread, but even the notion of developing a baseline for subsequent comparisons ignores the forest for the trees.

The value in regular MRIs will be in having them done at such a frequency that all sorts of new knowledge will pop up. I look at this and wonder, how much of my lifelong suffering from scoliosis and all of the work I have to do on an ongoing basis could have been mitigated by early detection of a wonky spine, and physical therapy to help straighten me out?

Imagine not just a baseline, but an annual full-body workup. You could track all of the weird knobs on all of your organs, estimate their growth rate, and extrapolate risks from that.

The two huge wins from full-body scanning will be continuous internal observability, and population-level data production that will give us the statistical insight to spot problems well ahead of time and filter then from non-problems for treatment.

A pox upon the gatekeepers.