More isn’t better, redux

Niko Karvounis writes on the problem of breast MRIs being too sensitive:

The big problem with all this, of course, isn’t just that women are undergoing more mastectomies””but that, because MRI scans have a relatively high rate of false positives, that women are undergoing more unnecessary mastectomies. This is especially worrisome given that the sensitivity of MRI scans are so high that, once cancer has been found in one breast, they are increasingly being used to detect early-stage cancer in the other breast. This means we may well be seeing an increase in double mastectomies over time.