3 ms·

Wait, what's the downside of scanning for everything?

• jacquesm 9y ago
  The downside of scanning for everything is that you'll end up increasing the cost of medicine considerably for extremely little gain. Case in point: breast cancer screenings catch a lot of malignant tumors in an early stage helping many patients before their cases become more serious. But the downside is that it has caused a large number of un-necessary procedures as well raising the costs and - and this is the kicker - blocking the available capacity with cases that would never become serious in turn denying that capacity to people whose cases are serious. A bit of googling will give you lots of articles on the subject, the same kind of evidence exists for prostate and other cancer screenings as well as other diseases.
  • fossuser 9y ago
    For another great book related to your breast cancer example check out The Emperor of All Maladies. It’s a detailed history of cancer and spends some time talking in detail about how statistics determine at what age preventative testing makes sense given false positive risk.