alt Hacker NewsUnnecessary medical treatments can have serious consequences. Even if you are absolutely certain you have a given condition, some treatments are very not worth it. More importantly, any given scan misses tons of important potential health issues. Not just the fact that CT scans don't show signs of MS vs MRIs, but neither of them will tell you about many cardiovascular conditions. So time spent treating made up issues from CT scans you don't need may be better spent doing other regular exams instead. Meanwhile, many aggressive cancers will be far too fast for any reasonable scan interval to catch in time. (And CT scans, to my understanding, can miss tumors early on, since it can't see as fine of detail as MRIs.)
But surely the mistake is doing the unnecessary treatment, not getting the information in the first place. In the above hypothetical where I could get an impossibly detailed full body scan result for free, I would absolutely do it.
I understand that in practice getting more information often leads to unnecessary treatment, so that in some cases the real world results are better if less investigation is done. But that's not inevitable; it depends on the choices made as a result of that information.