Steve Jobs and pancreatic cancer

Speaking of pancreatic cancer and detection.

I disagree - no responsible doc should be exposing people to CTs without a good reason. Prevention, without risk factors for something specific, is not a good reason. CTs give patients several orders of magnitude more radiation than x-rays. Some radiologists are concerned about the risk of giving cancer to people through unnecessary radiation.

MRIs are a bit of a different story - but still. Incidentolomas happen much more frequently than actual tumors, and you could end up doing your patient more harm than good.

Standards of care exist for a reason. The wealthy can certainly pay for unnecessary radiology studies if they want them, but that doesn’t mean that’s a good thing. I’ve seen adds selling full-body CTs to anyone off the street that can pay, for that matter.

Apparently Apple Stock Holders don’t need to panic though: http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20090118

I’ll agree, Get well soon Mr. Jobs.