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KingMob 3 hours ago

It's more statisticians saying this, and not doctors per se. You run into issues of signal detection theory, false positives, and the lay confusion that Bayesian P(A|B) !== P(B|A).

You're right that we could take steps to fix it, but unfortunately, those steps involve mass education that every human body has anomalies, and many of those should just be ignored.

We'd get a wave of anxiety, lawsuits, and unnecessary interventions, until humanity collectively internalized this.

andreareina 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's also doctors. Medlife Crisis on YouTube, Barbell Medicine, others. BBM have an article on priorities for overall health and they link to a tool maintained by one of the professional bodies on what routine screens to have done and it's pretty conservative. Even my doctor on seeing an "abnormal" lab result said it was likely spurious given my lack of complaints and all the rest of the results. That said they still recommended a follow-up because they kind of have to given professional ethics. BBM (again) made a similar point: resistance training is known to cause liver-associated enzymes (AST, ALT, etc) to rise, that doesn't mean you can ignore a high value.

The steps to fixing it is to not take the test that takes you from a prior of 1/100000 to a posterior of 1/1000, because you're going to ignore it anyway. And you can't depend on multiple testing because those test results can be correlated.

ETA: I can be convinced that we can collectively get to a place where broader screening would be indicated. But I think it's going to require both of the tests getting better and being better about what we do with (and feel about) the results.

mnicky 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[dead]

camillomiller 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[flagged]