4 ms·

> I’m in my early 30s and am starting to think about getting a screening. This is a pretty stupid thing to do unless you've had some sort of symptom or family

> I’m in my early 30s and am starting to think about getting a screening. This is a pretty stupid thing to do unless you've had some sort of symptom or family history. Your protection from illness due to screening is statistical, and jumping out of the calculated recommendation just makes it more likely to hurt you (false positives, false negatives, injuries from the procedure) than to benefit you. Desperately trying to fabricate a reason is just intentionally trying to hurt yourself. I'm not against colonoscopies (is anyone?) and I personally had my first one early because of an odd pain. Turned out to be unrelated. edit: the neurotic desperation for disease screening that I see in a lot of people bothers me a lot because it's this odd fetishization of medical science combined with the active subversion of it. For me it's a weird insistence that all tests are good but that the math behind them is not.

briHass 8mo ago
From a 'public health' perspective, it makes perfect sense to limit the frequency of screening procedures by age and other broad risk-factors, but that doesn't help at the individual level if you fall on the unlucky side of those statistics. Most cancers are still very much lethal once they progress to a certain point, and the best treatment we know of is early detection. Many of the cancer screens are harmless or don't add significant risk of death, so it really comes down to money and medical resource availability (also solved with money.) I don't see much difference in someone paying out-of-pocket for a full-body MRI/colonoscopy vs. them spending way above average on any other item that slightly reduces the risk of dying (how many smoke alarms and fire extinguishers does your home have?)
- dehrmann 8mo ago
  > that doesn't help at the individual level if you fall on the unlucky side of those statistics As GP stated, there's the other unlucky side of the statistics with false positives.

briHass 8mo ago

From a 'public health' perspective, it makes perfect sense to limit the frequency of screening procedures by age and other broad risk-factors, but that doesn't help at the individual level if you fall on the unlucky side of those statistics. Most cancers are still very much lethal once they progress to a certain point, and the best treatment we know of is early detection. Many of the cancer screens are harmless or don't add significant risk of death, so it really comes down to money and medical resource availability (also solved with money.) I don't see much difference in someone paying out-of-pocket for a full-body MRI/colonoscopy vs. them spending way above average on any other item that slightly reduces the risk of dying (how many smoke alarms and fire extinguishers does your home have?)

dehrmann 8mo ago
> that doesn't help at the individual level if you fall on the unlucky side of those statistics As GP stated, there's the other unlucky side of the statistics with false positives.