A full body MRI earns you a year of smoking

According to a LessWrong analysis, routine full-body MRI screening offers modest but real health benefits. The author converts those benefits into micromorts—a unit representing one in a million chance of death. The net gain from a routine MRI is about nine hundred twenty-six micromorts. That's equivalent to the annual risk of smoking, climbing Matterhorn, a high-risk pregnancy, or two BASE jumps. Here's the catch: most screening benefit comes from testing sick people. When applied to asymptomatic populations, you get mostly false alarms. Of a thousand patients scanned, perhaps four to eight genuinely benefit from early detection, while the rest face unnecessary anxiety, biopsies, and time costs. But the math works out: those small gains for the lucky few outweigh the harms to the many. Bottom line: if you'd avoid two BASE jumps to stay healthy, a full-body MRI makes sense.

Listen to this story

Hear this and more stories in a personalized audio briefing.

Open The Chonkerton