Every year in the US most americans get an annual physical from our doctor if we have insurance. It usually consists of getting some bloodwork done, vitals basic questions etc. Then going over those results and any concerns you may have and nothing else.
I always hear those horror stories of people just all of a sudden being diagnosed with stage 4 cancer and theres nothing that can be done. Maybe im missing something.
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As others have posted, scanning and learning about a disease can be as harmful, or more harmful than, the disease itself in many cases. Borrowing from the [overkill](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/11/overkill-atul-gawande) essay (2015) by Atul Gawande.
*…. Another powerful force toward unnecessary care emerged years after Arrow’s paper: the phenomenon of overtesting, which is a by-product of all the new technologies we have for peering into the human body. It has been hard for patients and doctors to recognize that tests and scans can be harmful. Why not take a look and see if anything is abnormal? People are discovering why not. The United States is a country of three hundred million people who annually undergo around fifteen million nuclear medicine scans, a hundred million CT and MRI scans, and almost ten billion laboratory tests. Often, these are fishing expeditions, and since no one is perfectly normal you tend to find a lot of fish. If you look closely and often enough, almost everyone will have a little nodule that can’t be completely explained, a lab result that is a bit off, a heart tracing that doesn’t look quite right.*
Modern medicine has evolved to treat all cancers aggressively independent of expected outcomes. Aggressive scanning can lead to aggressive treatment and low value or unnecessary care.
Also, highly recommend the books Better and Being Mortal by Atul Gawande which touch on similar challenging topics.
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