What are you talking about? There’s a huge body of public health literature about the dangers of for example doing too many colonoscopies on people below a certain age.
This isn’t a controversial claim at all among people familiar with stats on outcomes across large populations. It’s tricky to get right and your glib dismissal comes across as arrogant and ignorant.
The idea that you believe that the entire public health establishment on 3 continents is wrong about the risk of preventative scans is ridiculous. Surely you. have some evidence to support your heterodox position. It can't be that "doctors are innumerate," because I assure you that many aren't, and there are statisticians that work in public health.
How do you propose the medical field determines which small tumors will become life threatening in general? Can you beat the best research hospitals in this task? Even an average oncologist?
i already explained my reasoning above; it's obviously correct, and it doesn't depend on my knowledge about which small tumors will become life-threatening, so it sounds like you didn't understand it
you can calculate the cost and expected morbidity due to any particular candidate test (mri, blood panel, biopsy, ct, pet, whatever) and compare it against the reduced expected morbidity due to the probably-not-present disease, using whatever metric of morbidity you like best (ypll, daly, expected change in your malpractice insurance premiums, whatever), using whatever risk tolerance you like best
for mris and blood panels obviously this will favor doing the test in almost all cases, unless traveling to the hospital is a significant hardship or the money is enough to be important to you
for other tests it may not, and watchful waiting is often a better choice than doing further tests
with a little work, you can always beat the best research hospitals at this task because you care about different things than they do. this is not the same thing as beating them at guessing whether your prostate is going to kill you before something else does
I totally agree with you. This idea that “there is no problem if we don’t look for one” is absurd. We have plenty of statistical techniques to prevent unnecessary surgeries for every anomaly in an MRI scan; let’s utilize those instead of keeping medicine in the dark ages.
This isn’t a controversial claim at all among people familiar with stats on outcomes across large populations. It’s tricky to get right and your glib dismissal comes across as arrogant and ignorant.