Imaging data can be lethal – I’ve seen a number of cases myself and seen many more discussed in professional medical forums. We do not yet know how to interpret the data we are seeing coming from healthy (or asymptomatic) people. There is a solution to this problem, but it requires foreknowledge and discipline. It will be discussed shortly.

Literally just a few days ago, and elderly cryonicist who was scanned to get his cardiac calcium score was found to have inflammation and some mucus plugging in some areas of one lung as an incidental finding. He is clinically well. A BAL procedure was suggested. I can tell you straight-up that if you do BALs on 100 patients in his age and medical condition, you will likely seriously injure or kill one or two of them. Nothing in his scan suggests any possible useful intervention that would not be just as possible or useful should he become symptomatic. He did not have the BAL and it has been several weeks and he remains well.

Ideally, (as I point out in a future segment) DSSing would be done in an institutional framework (one I was hoping to create, alas now postponed). In fact, arguably, it is the only way to do it. If I had know circumstances (for me) were to have changed so suddenly in the last 24 hours, I would have withheld this information and not run this series of articles at all. But, I’ve started, and it is unarguably more hazardous to stop than to proceed.

I’ve given consideration to running all of the remaining components at once. However, it has been my experience that this results in a) complaints about too much to read at once, b) people not reading and absorbing the material incrementally, as it was written to be read.

I’ll also give consideration to pulling the existing articles and possibly bundling the entire article into a PDF which will be available on-line. I’m not sure about this yet.

Finally, this idea is one which I’ve been considering and working on for several years. I spoke with a number of experts in medical imaging, in the ethics of screening interventions and attempted elicit help from a range of professionals in and out of the cryonics community (unsuccessfully). I did this because I’ve seen medical imaging maim and kill healthy people. I was also a first-hand witness to the “Holter monitor” fiasco of the 1970s, where hordes of patients were placed on antiarrhythmic drugs only to be injured or killed by them. I took over a year to (I hope) carefully weigh the risks vs. the benefits of DSSing.

Ultimately, there is no way to know until you do the experiment. Having said that, it is incumbent upon all involved to pursue this “experiment” in a responsible fashion, avoiding known pitfalls. And it IS an experiment. And there will be bite back. There always is. — Mike Darwin