The existing downsides of a might-be-cancer hit on a test are real, for now - a statistically significant number of people with a breast cancer diagnosis end up

The existing downsides of a might-be-cancer hit on a test are real, for now - a statistically significant number of people with a breast cancer diagnosis end up killing themselves out of despair or doing radical surgery "to be sure", which detracts from the social benefit of mammograms. But there's no indication that they would persist if false positives were more common because proactive testing was more common. There would be a pipeline of followup testing and risk evaluation, which would be normalized by how common it was and how nonlethal diagnostic hits would become. It would become "Oh, yeah, my cousin got a hit, but followup biopsy said it was a mutation that doesn't metastasize. Guess we'll see next week." rather than "My great-grandmother died of breast cancer, my mother died of breast cancer, my friend's aunt died of breast cancer, this feels like a death sentence", which is the information people who receive hits on their mammogram testing are acculturated with now.