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I don't dispute either of your points. It was a genuine mere curiosity on my end, not a rhetorical "gotcha!". I've just heard that for stuff like prostate can

I don't dispute either of your points. It was a genuine mere curiosity on my end, not a rhetorical "gotcha!". I've just heard that for stuff like prostate cancer, a diagnosis can be misleading, because sometimes it can take 20+ years to kill you. If you get it when you're 70, it's probably not worth going through surgery or chemo because you'll likely die of heart disease or another cancer before that anyway.

thfuran 2y ago
That sort of issue crops up all the time in medicine. Screening for conditions will always produce some false positives, and the ramifications can vary from scaring the shit out of someone for a few weeks before you determine they don't have cancer after all to them dying as a result of further testing/treatment that wouldn't have happened without that initial screening. That and the potential adverse outcomes of the screening itself (and its costs) always has to be weighed against the value of the true positives.