You're 100% wrong here, this is not a given. Prostate cancer screenings, which are very common, can have both false positives as well as findings of cancer that is and would remain completely benign. These can both lead to unnecessary treatments that cause serious negative health effects, including incontinence and erectile dysfunction.
https://www.cdc.gov/cancer/prostate/basic_info/benefits-harm...
An ultrasound of the thyroid often leads to finding a nodule. Which leads to a biopsy. Which comes out indeterminate. Which leads to a thyroidectomy and life long dependence on thyroid hormones.
Another one is ductal carcinoma in situ. Read somewhere there is a 1% chance that will evolve into cancer. And yet you have women having double mastectomies and chemo for it.
This is by far the most inaccurate medical claim I've ever seen on HN. Where on earth did you get this from?
The whole point of diagnosing DCIS on screening mammography is that it avoids systemic therapy and mastectomy. It also wouldn't be bilateral.
The math is easy. If we don't have the numbers for it, then get them. Plenty of people get prostate cancer and some of them choose to just monitor. We should have plenty of information to make a rational decision. This seems preferable to blinding ourselves out of fear that we'll do something stupid with the information we might get.
This isn't a simple problem of calculating EV. Telling somebody that there's a 40% chance that the positive test is actually wrong and in the 60% case that it's right, 40% of the time it's going to be benign, but if it's not benign it might kill them but if it is benign and they do surgery they might be left wearing diapers is not a simple thing for a person to evaluate. Add to that the fact that people have a bias towards action, so doctors tend to overindex on treatment vs. just ignoring something, and you have an incredibly complex problem.
> The math is easy.
No, it's not. It's a series of probabilities combined with extremely subjective outcomes (getting erectile dysfunction may have a very different impact on your life if you're 40 vs. 80).
> If we don't have the numbers for it, then get them.
You're just trivializing medicine and medical research here. Why don't you just go ahead and build some AI that'll solve this whole problem by diagnosing cancers based on a blood sample? That seems easy enough.
> This seems preferable to blinding ourselves out of fear that we'll do something stupid with the information we might get.
Ironically what you're describing here is the opposite of everything you've just talked about. If we understand the numbers well, and from those we can conclude that tests are highly prone to false positives and thus that treatment based on positive results is more likely to be harmful than helpful, then we shouldn't take those tests. That's not blinding ourselves, it's acting appropriately based on understanding the math.
