131–140 of 389 posts
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why would it matter desides for informational purposes?
In an extreme case you could prove that you had your "it kills you within the year" cancer already a few years ago.
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But: that surgery is not without risk, and if there are no symptoms there is a fair chance that there never will be symptoms. Depending on your age and your genetic make-up you might be more or less at risk. There is such a thing as spontaneous remission and so on. So no, I'm not 'basically giving up', and no you won't die anyway (well, unless you take that in the most abstract way), in particular likely not from can…
Again, absolutely absurd. Many cancers have no symptoms until it’s too late. Do you even understand this? At that point the choices for treatment are extremely limited. Even breast cancer needs x-rays to detect lumps, not detect cancer. You need a subsequent biopsy to differentiate. That’s our technology right now. If we had a blood test to detect cancer, not lumps, it’s game changing. Maybe after a generation of ear…
Yes, it is a game changer, but it is not the kind of game changer that this is being made out to be here and mass screening using this method is not going to lead to improved outcomes.
As an extra tool in the toolbox of the diagnostician it is very useful.
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Actually you don't want this, and you are describing a nightmare scenario that everyone who studies health policy understands all too well. Mass screening of healthy people will result in extreme iatrogenics and unnecessary psychological damage and stress (which leads to physical effects as well), not to mention overwhelming the medical system. The fact is that many things that could be detected will never result in…
The argument you’re making has always bothered me because it’s hiding the ball. If finding something that otherwise carries no symptoms is best left untreated, then the fact that you found it should make no difference to the decision. The doctor should say that the best course of action is to do nothing. More information can never be harmful. If you know information is best not acted on in the abstract, then you also…
>If finding something that otherwise carries no symptoms is best left untreated, then the fact that you found it should make no difference to the decision. The doctor should say that the best course of action is to do nothing. More information can never be harmful.
Absolutely and demonstratively false. There is an entire field of health policy that destroys this harmful idea. First of all, just because something doesn't carry symptoms NOW doesn't mean it won't carry symptoms LATER, but doctors can't always predict this and aren't perfect decision making machines. Many times the patient will push them for further tests and treatment (or the doctors will advocate for it to ease the mind of the patient) which leads to potential harm from unnecessary treatments. And this is just ONE of the ways patients are harmed by unnecessary screening. There is also the psychological damage of having a condition you wouldn't have otherwise known about, and living with that knowledge (take aneurysms for example). Psychological stress has a real physical toll on the body. Then there's the COST associated with unnecessary screening and treatments, which (especially in the US) can run into the thousands quite easily for even simple interventions as a result of unnecessary screening.
Even after that, a screening process can also find something that could be bad, but in some patients doesn't actually decrease their lifespan or quality of life. If we have no way of adjudicating between these cases or predicting which cases will end up bad if left untreated at the present moment, what do you think will happen? People will ask to be treated anyway, and iatrogenics will rear its ugly head.
You cannot ASSUME that screening is automatically good. It must PROVE itself as such in a randomized clinical trial. This trial must show that people live longer and/or better as a result of this intervention. In many well documented cases, this turns out NOT to be the case, which entirely destroys your original rebuttal.
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Regularly checking people that are otherwise healthy for cancer will turn up a lot of cancer through false positives or slowly growing ones, will lead to a lot of unnecessary intervention and will in fact lead to a reduction in quality of life and lifespan. This is one of the reasons why exhaustive cancer screening (which was more costly in the past but could have been done) was not promoted, it had nothing to do wit…
Have heard your argument on the false positives and unnecessary interventions many times. It is not a good argument. In fact, it makes no sense. If you get a positive with an uncertainty in its accuracy, at the very least, the test is repeated. But even more, you can use the information from the investigation of the reason for the false positive to improve the tests in the first place. If we weren't humans and the un…
This assumes that the false positive is caused randomly. That's not the case. False positive tests are usually followed by false positive tests. Then it will take years to find out if it was a false positive or not.
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Your belief has no representation in medical science, which is mostly evidence based. A lot of data has been collected on this, studies (many) have been conducted and the general consensus is that more testing absent symptoms does not lead to improved patient outcomes. That you want to have some kind of theoretical argument in the face of this evidence might be interesting to you but it isn't to me.
Less information is better? That would be a bit of a paradox in science. I suppose we might take 2 steps forward and 1 step backward in the short term. As medical science advances, hopefully we can address any shortcomings from the additional early knowledge. I noticed that pancreatic is on the list. This cancer is almost always fatal because we can't detect it early.
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The fact that you link to that and apparently do not understand it combined with a personal attack is enough to disregard your comment for me. But let me stress this in case it wasn't clear to you: screening and early diagnosis are not the same thing. If you screen a large population for cancer you will turn up a lot of cancers that may never become a problem, or that may even end up being re-absorbed without the nee…
You come in and flame other users, but then take deep offense when you get it back. Treat others with respect and in turn you'll receive it.
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Again, absolutely absurd. Many cancers have no symptoms until it’s too late. Do you even understand this? At that point the choices for treatment are extremely limited. Even breast cancer needs x-rays to detect lumps, not detect cancer. You need a subsequent biopsy to differentiate. That’s our technology right now. If we had a blood test to detect cancer, not lumps, it’s game changing. Maybe after a generation of ear…
Even if you detect cancer you will still need a biopsy to figure out which bits are the cancer and which bits are just 'lumps'. Yes, it is a game changer, but it is not the kind of game changer that this is being made out to be here and mass screening using this method is not going to lead to improved outcomes. As an extra tool in the toolbox of the diagnostician it is very useful.
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Actually you don't want this, and you are describing a nightmare scenario that everyone who studies health policy understands all too well. Mass screening of healthy people will result in extreme iatrogenics and unnecessary psychological damage and stress (which leads to physical effects as well), not to mention overwhelming the medical system. The fact is that many things that could be detected will never result in…
Utterly wrong. You are conflating current technology like MRIs and CT scans that only detect lumps, to blood tests that detect CANCER. Yes, if every lump were treated and excised then it would be problematic. But CANCER is different. The only cancer that you might be able to leave alone is prostate because it grows so slowly. Everything else is a risk. And if we can treat cancer at early stage 1, then maybe people wo…
Read this and learn something: https://www.bmj.com/content/352/bmj.h6080
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Note this test is about early detection, not prevention. If your pancreatic cancer is detected early, you will still need to have your insides rearranged to get it out.
There is no early detection for pancreatic cancer. So we don’t know what we can do yet. Right now by the time we detect it, we are dead. An entire generation of early detection might create new methods to treat it. We don’t know what we don’t know.
The third paragraph of the article says otherwise. Do you have some knowledge about this test not working?
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Again, personally, I lost both parents to cancer. One thyroid (very slow progression) one pancreatic (very fast). In both cases, I believe that pre-symptomatic detection would have had a high probability of eradicating their cancers. That experience skews my view and if I get the opportunity, I'll have these tests done 3x annually. But I understand your point. How about making it elective? That way, people who prefer…
I'm really sorry for your loss, but please try to keep a healthy balance between personal tragedy versus medical policy set for a whole population, which are two entirely different things. For any particular individual, especially those who end up dying from cancer early detection would have likely mattered. Which is exactly where the problem lies: that is a large number of people, but still (much) smaller than the n…
Prostate, Skin, Colon