# Should People Avoid Whole-Body Screening Info?

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/astral-codex-ten-podcast-226483/should-people-avoid-whole-body-screening-info
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/astral-codex-ten-podcast-226483/should-people-avoid-whole-body-screening-info.md
Podcast: [Astral Codex Ten Podcast](https://stenobird.com/podcast/astral-codex-ten-podcast-226483)
Published: 2026-07-10T12:06:00+00:00
Episode link: https://sscpodcast.libsyn.com/should-people-avoid-whole-body-screening-info
Audio file: https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sscpodcast/Should_People_Avoid_Whole-Body_Screening_Info.mp3?dest-id=586545
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/astral-codex-ten-podcast-226483/episodes/should-people-avoid-whole-body-screening-info
Duration seconds: 1493

## Resource

The most controversial part of last week's article on the Midjourney ultrasound scanner was medical experts' recommendation against whole-body screening (including existing whole-body screening technology using MRI). Isn't this crazy? Whole-body screening can save lives by detecting serious diseases like cancer. The experts counterargue that it finds so many false positives - minor zit-like imperfections that would never have caused problems, but which cost patients time, money, anxiety, and side effect burden to investigate - that it ends up net negative. But isn't this just a problem of setting thresholds correctly? Can't you commit to only investigating the most obviously bad things, then ignore the rest? This seemed like an interesting problem to investigate in more depth, so I've tried to get numbers. These are rough estimates loosely based on parameters extracted from unsatisfactory studies1 - please don't take them seriously as exact values, just as right-order-of-magnitude estimates. We'll focus on whole-body MRIs, since this is a well-studied existing technology, then speculate later on how the results might generalize to whole-body ultrasound. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/should-people-avoid-whole-body-screening

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## Transcript

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