Re: before / after
When the open MRI came out and all the top hospitals started converting, there was a glut of old-style closed ones. (And speaking of claustrophobia, I don't have it but good God would that thing test it. Kept my eyes closed for the whole test.)
Clinics started popping up that bought the older systems and offered a full-body exploratory MRI, and of course offering followup on whatever they found. Even leaving aside the financial incentive to find and treat something, it turned out if you scan anyone over the age of 30 you'll find a half-dozen things that would be concerning if there were associated symptoms.
After some analysis, it turned out the risk of complications from exploring and/or treating asymptomatic anomalies was higher than the risk of one of those anomalies being meaningful. But of course every clinic tells the story of the one-in-a-million case where someone identified cancer early.
All that being said ... the condition I have is congenital and familial. My father's near-identical experience convinces me this isn't just what they found to explain what I did, it's the underlying problem. In theory, removing some bone to create a wider channel sounds eminently reasonable. But my lizard brain thinks, "Open up my back and chisel around my spinal cord?" and I get the willies.
