> The biggest push-back from the medical profession is diagnosing cancers that are not clinically relevant and treatable (eg. A cancer may be detected 15 years before clinically relevant in some cases to my understanding). There is also a cost benefit dynamic of increasing preventative screening, for example lowering the prescribed age for breast screening would save lives but may carry costs for nations or corporations that are unacceptable.
I've watched two people who waited for too long to seek treatment become eaten alive, quite literally, so I would have to imagine that at least on an individual level it would be a good idea to seek this out.
Just to make sure I understand, are you saying that the problem is that people essentially get a very early warning of a diagnosis, so they start coming in for regular checks to see if it has become treatable, but it has not, but they come in fairly frequently, and those frequent visits use a lot of time and thus this process would not scale to the general population?
The argument also goes that some cancers may never become clinically relevant, or in the case of the sick, vulnerable or elderly other causes of death will get you before the cancer does - And so detection in these cases may cause “unnecessary” treatment, patient worry and burden on society.
1. What is the average number of cancers per person as a function of age?
2. How many of those cancers are clinically relevant now?
3. How many will become clinically relevant in the future?
Then we can have an informed discussion about the trade-offs.
Unfortunately, I suspect that nobody actually knows those numbers. (So maybe we have to start doing the scanning, at least on a study population, in order to find out...)
I read a medical article some time back stating that cancer (and tumors in general) occur all the time in basically everybody, but in the vast majority of cases, the immune system kills them.
I've experienced this personally, and visibly. I've had a few moles appear on my skin, then subsequently a white ring would appear around it (presumably my body was killing ALL melanocytes in that region?) while the mole slowly shrank over the span of a few months. I have a few dozen other moles that my body never bothered doing anything about.
And this is just the skin. I'm not sure I want to know what's gone on in the other 90% of my biomass.
I've watched two people who waited for too long to seek treatment become eaten alive, quite literally, so I would have to imagine that at least on an individual level it would be a good idea to seek this out.
Just to make sure I understand, are you saying that the problem is that people essentially get a very early warning of a diagnosis, so they start coming in for regular checks to see if it has become treatable, but it has not, but they come in fairly frequently, and those frequent visits use a lot of time and thus this process would not scale to the general population?