From 2018 to 2022, nearly half of all lung cancers were diagnosed at a distant stage, meaning the cancer had spread from the lungs to distant parts of the body. https://www.cdc.gov/united-sta...
Nearly all pancreatic cancer is diagnosed late.
Cancer is 95% curable in stage I, and 95% incurable in stage IV.
I'm in biotech, a big problem the field tries to solve is late-diagnosis .. investors are throwing lots of money at liquid biopsy and early diagnosis --- for good reason. But forget my bias on that. How old are you? I mean, I've lived some years and seen too many incidents of late diagnosis especially of cancer.
Statistics don't work for you, maybe you need anecdotal evidence? I have three stories that occurred within the decade to friends:
1. I had a friend, a non-smoker .. middle age, who coughed blood and went to the ER. After some investigation (CT scan/X-ray) they told him he very likely had lung cancer stage III (basically a point where it was very hard to cure). Right before they told him that, they asked this question: "when was your last chest X-ray?" Note: Stage I lung cancer costs a median $25,000 to treat and patient likely lives, stage IV lung cancer costs almost ten times as much at $210,000 and even after spending that the patient is highly certain to die.
2. Also happened to my ex's friend. In her case she even went to the doctors early and they kept telling her it's a UTI, after some rounds they did an ultrasound and told her she was "urinating wrong" .. I'm not even kidding they told her .. a woman in her 30s that she wasn't fully emptying her bladder when she pees and that was leading to UTIs. And after some months of THAT .. they FINALLY did an MRI or CT-scan and found out it was (by then) stage IV bladder cancer.
3. A person I know in his 60s had been complaining of back pain .. first his doctors treated it as some kind of muscle pain or BS. Then, after a few YEARS of that .. they did an X-ray or CT scan .. they told him it was a cyst. "It's not cancer, if you've had the pain for years". Did nothing, put him on anti-inflammatories and maybe a steroid injection. A year passes, the pain had got worse. They FINALLY do an MRI or PET-CT. Guess what it's fucking bone cancer, stage IV .. too late to cure.