My sister in law is 50, is very nice but pretty compulsive about health issues. By that I mean her fussing about her daughter’s health so much the pediatrican said she was bordering on benign Munchhausen by proxy, she always has a new fad diet to try, and has literally thrashed 3 blenders by making gross concoctions. There’s more, but I’ll spare you the details. No doubt her mother’s death from breast cancer at 55 is a factor. Today she announced she had a full body MRI scan on her own volition and against the advice of her doctor that cost her $2600 “just to see if anything was the matter and establish a baseline.” Given that my wife and I just forked over $5,000 for her daughters’ tuition, I’m 1) wondering if the scan is in any way a reasonable precaution 2) wondering if this is a sign of significant neurotic behaviour. Thoughts?
Uh …yeah, I would say she has a problem. Why would you enable her by paying the kids way to school. Don’t do that again! You guys should have an intervention, get her some help.
There’s a considerable body of opinion that getting full-body scans (CT or MRI) is a bad idea in an asymptomatic person.
*"Without symptoms though the chances that you will get useful information from a routine MRI whole body scan are tiny…
Examples (of potentially useful targeted testing) include mammograms for breast cancer in women and ultrasound scans for aortic aneurysms in men.
So the answer to worries about “hidden illness” certainly isn’t to throw yourself at the nearest MRI scanner in the hope that something sticks.
Not least because you may end up lifting the lid on things you’d have been better off keeping hidden away.
Scans are so “all-seeing” these days that you can count yourself lucky to get a complete all-clear — figures suggest that whole body scans will spot something wrong in up to one in three cases.
Yet the vast majority of these findings are harmless cysts, swellings or nodules.
We docs call them “incidentalomas” or “pseudodisease”.
Trouble is, they may need monitoring and further scans to make 100 per cent sure they are nothing to worry about. Result?
Further expense, lots of stress and deep regret that you got the ball rolling in the first place."*
Aside from cystic lesions in organs like the liver and pancreas (that are very likely to be benign but once discovered may be followed up with testing and invasive procedures), there are things like inactive granulomatous disease of the lungs and mediastinal lymph nodes that can look ominous on scanning, but especially in certain parts of the country like the Ohio Valley, are commonplace lesions related to remote, asymptomatic Histoplasma infection. They can even light up on PET scans, a finding that causes confusion with malignancy.
Given that lab tests will often yield erroneous anomalies in about 1 of every 20 parameters tested, it’s not surprising that imaging turns up false positives too.
We put money toward tuition in August, this just got sprung on us, the MRI place takes credit cards and the school doesn’t, and we won’t get fooled again!
Good. Why doesn’t the school take credit cards. I 've had 3 kids in college and used credit cards at different times. Don’t believe that lie again. Really, get that woman some help!
How did she even get a full body MRI against her doctor’s wishes? Didn’t she need doctor’s orders/paperwork to have it done? And what’s with the tuition? Did her insurance actually cover the MRI? I’m guessing it did not so how does she have $2600 to spend on that but not her kids tuition? I’d be frustrated with her to say the least.
Thanks for the opinions. The university stopped taking credit cards for tuition some time ago as it has to pay fees to the credit card company. I work there, so I know it is the policy. The clinic is a private one (we’re in Soviet Canuckistan) so anyone with the money can pay and play. Why does she have the money for the MRI but not tuition? She doesn’t. But the clinic takes credit cards…
If you’re willing to pay out of pocket, you can get most any medical test. There are plenty of places, some rather scammy, that will push people to get these tests with little or no diagnostic benefit.