Harms of Medical Screenings

Yes - in addition, medical professionals warn against “overdiagnosis” from unnecessary screenings.This can happen when we choose to treat otherwise benign issues that would have had few negative consequences for our health or longevities. Those treatments can have negative effects that are worse than the ailment we’re trying to treat.I know it’s a natural tech-guy impulse to quantify everything and get access to as much data as you can, but that myopic focus can actually lead us to optimiz

Random screening are more harmful than useful. Overdiagnosis[0] is a thing.[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overdiagnosis

I'm not a doctor. I just write software.Not doing unneeded tests has parallels to not doing unneeded logging. The costs may be low, but they're not zero.Sure -- if you have a problem, it might have been nice to have screened for it earlier, or to have logged more data for that flow; but if a problem is rare, the costs for doing all the tests or all the logs adds up.In medicine specifically, we often read about interventions that turn out to have not been the greatest idea. Avo

It's bad for the individual too. Many checks have non-trivial rates of false positives, many treatments have non-trivial rates of severe complication.Checking occasionally for something specific that's reasonably suspected due to symptoms is good. If you're always checking for everything, you have a high risk of finding something you don't actually have. It turns out that that risk overrides the beneficial chance of finding something real before it has any symptoms.

How could the screening do you harm? (other than financial)

My ex girlfriend was a doctor and we talked about this once. The gist of it that I got was that excessive early tests have a lot of risk factors that come along with them, because tests themselves being harmful (CT scans cause something like 5% of all cancers), and because false positives lead to unnecessary treatments, surgeries, medications, etc which can cause real harm. Basically, if the expected harm from the proactive testing is greater than the expected harm it would mitigate, you don

Agreed. For more see https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/08/18/6395885...

There's a reason medical tests aren't made easily accessible. The science of when regular testing something helps is complicated. If you test for things that are rare you might cause more harm than good by doing mass testing, because you might overwhelmingly treat people with false positive test results.There's a lively debate around various cancer screening initiatives, which often don't have any good evidence that they overall do more good than harm. The same mechanisms

The general issue is that doing more tests can catch more things earlier. But all tests have false positives, and false positives can lead to more tests and in some cases to unneeded treatment, which can cause more harm than good.It's perhaps unintuitive, but more testing isn't always good. The benefits need to outweigh the risks, and it isn't always the case. There are ongoing debates about who should be screened for various types of cancer, for example, and the "right&qu

It's funny that we only apply this "more data = bad" logic to things that aren't readily visible.If you have a palpable or visible likely-benign condition that isn't causing symptoms, such as a mole, rash, or lump, every doctor will recommend getting that checked out. Most of the time it'll turn out to be completely innocuous, but you'll go to the doctor and they'll decide between it's fine, monitoring, invasive investigation, and urgent treatment.