This has been my experience. And I’ve had oncologists echo exactly this. In the words of one: MRIs find too much.

The CT and the PET/CT are the gold standards for finding cancer, finding recurrences, and staging cancer. The trouble is the radiation dose.

MRI provides very inconclusive results. You’ll see something but it’ll be unclear what it is. And often what you see is not even visible on a CT. Or it’s visible on a PET/CT and is showing metabolic activity indicating its cancer.

MRIs are great for certain things like herniated disks in your back. They suck at cancer.

> One study in 2020 found that 95% of asymptomatic patients had some type of "abnormal" finding, but just 1.8% of these findings were indeed cancer.

So a bit less than 1.8% of the time in this study

> Prenuvo's recent Polaris Study followed 1,011 patients for at least one year following a whole-body MRI scan. Of these patients, 41 had biopsies. More than half of the 41 were diagnosed with cancer.

That's 2.0%

Note that this doesn't mean that 1.7~2.0% of people have cancer without knowing it. It could be more:

> A negative scan doesn’t mean you’re disease-free. Some cancers and conditions simply aren’t visible yet or aren’t reliably detected on a one-time full-body MRI."

But also perhaps less, in a way:

> "You're finding something that never would have caused you any problem in your life, and in cancer, we call that overdiagnosis," Vickers says.

But now you've found it you pretty much have to remove it, which has significant quality of life implications.

And anyway, you have to die of something so for me cancer would just be a sign that time's up.

But scanning frequently is overwhelmingly good for the patient. The problem is the doctors. Imagine two possibilities. 1. You scan every six months and a doctor reviews your scans but never tells you anything no matter what 2. You scan every six months and a doctor reviews your scans and only tells you results if you have an obviously growing mass that has a probability greater than 95% of being cancerous

Obviously #2 is better for the patient than #1, but #1 is equivalent to never testing if you ignore cost.

So the actual reason we don't have effect frequent scans combined with effective diagnostic techniques is cost, and doctors cope with this reality by saying clearly wrong things about "over diagnosis". It's a local minimum of the payer/provider dynamic that has nothing to do with scans per se.

Maybe I don't want to look for cancer right now but if I spend $1,000 every 5 years to take an image for later use... isn't that useful?

Let everyone who wants to pay get their scans! But don’t make me pay for you

2. i can afford the money for the chance of early detection. Many cancers are symptomatic only in the latter stages. It does not hurt to check.