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Cynically, if doctors are financially rewarded for performing treatments, doctors may prefer a test with significant false positives over one with minimal false
by jellicle 6y ago
Cynically, if doctors are financially rewarded for performing treatments, doctors may prefer a test with significant false positives over one with minimal false positives. (If your knee jerks and you start saying things like 'doctors never allow financial incentives to change their medical decisions!', let me respond by saying there are many studies that say that they do, and also you can replace 'doctors' with 'health-adjacent corporations' if you like.)
- kazinator 6y agoIf nobody at all has tuberculosis, then even a test heavily biased toward false negative will still produce nothing but false positives. In that situation, only two kinds of test will avoid false positives: (1) a perfectly reliable test, or else (2) a broken tests that never reports a positive.