3 ms·
> If you do a CT scan and it shows a mass, you’ll order a biopsy. > But because that patient was low-risk, the harms of that biopsy will outweigh the benefits.
by norswap 4y ago
> If you do a CT scan and it shows a mass, you’ll order a biopsy.
> But because that patient was low-risk, the harms of that biopsy will outweigh the benefits.
> Thus, you shouldn’t do the CT scan.
> What? If the harms of the biopsy outweigh the benefits, don’t do the damn biopsy!
I'm not sure what the point of doing the CT scan if we're not going to act on its result.
Sure, you gain the confidence that everything's gucci if it turns negative. Is that really worth the stress of the test going positive and the not doing the biopsy? Seems dubious to me.
- gpt5 4y agoThe author is not arguing against efficiency in the medical system, but against the reasoning of - “if we test for X bad things will happen”
- j-pb 4y agoIn a "perfect world" we'd all get routine checks, this would have two advantages: * Most illneses are easier to treat and have better long term outcomes in terms of morbidity, when they are detected early / in a asymptomatic stage. * We could collectively use the data collected from scanning "healthy" people, and adjust our bayesian priors so that we can more accurately adjust our diagnostic measures. E.g. common virus infections can give you brain lesions visible in MRI scans. However since MRIs are expensive we rarely scan healthy people so every lesion in an MRI is an immediate supicion of MS or other neurodegnerative diseases. We simply don't have good baselines for this. The latter would allow us to look at all the indicators more holistically to make a well balanced judgement if more invasive diagnostics are warranted.