Comment Screening != Treatment != Side effects (Score 1) 253
The general arguement is that 'screening comes with harms as well as benefits' (from TFA), which is false unless you believe that listening to the heart leads to side effects from open-heart surgery because too many false positive heart diseases or indolent heart conditions are overly treated. The problem lies within understanding the results and the possible outcomes from different treatments. For example, if cancer is found that is possibly slow growing or indolent, then go into a "watchful monitoring" treatment of more frequent and different checks. Because we have great screening systems that will be able to detect disease earlier and earlier, we need to understand that there is a point at which a disease is so early it is not worth treating. But it does not mean we should not look.
In othehr words, because bad actions can be taken as a result of getting the correct diagnosis information, then we need to fix our analysis and recommendation for treatments. Lets not stick our heads in the sand and not even look for the disease.
