I don't have a firm opinion but tend to agree with you, however... ...an article linked to here on HN many years ago argued that sometimes early detection can

I don't have a firm opinion but tend to agree with you, however... ...an article linked to here on HN many years ago argued that sometimes early detection can lead to downgraded quality of life. The examples they provided were of middle-age men diagnosed with very early stage prostate cancer, which sometimes led to surgery with debilitating complications (like erectile dysfunction, incontinence, and others). The article argued many of those cancers were effectively harmless, that those men would have died of something else after a long life without ever realizing they had cancer, and that the treatment was considerably worse than the disease. Of course, it could be argued that knowing is always better: that the mistake in those cases was to perform unnecessary surgery.