Cancer DNA is detectable in blood years before diagnosis

The big secret is that they could detect cancer very early in most people, but the health care companies don't want to pay for the screening. You can pay out of pocket for these procedures. I was told this by a cancer researcher

EDIT:

Adding these caveats:

1. There is a ton of nuance in the diagnosis, since most people have a small amount of cancer in their blood at all times

2. The screenings are 5-10k + follow up appointments to actually see if its real cancer

3. All in cost then could be much higher per person

4. These tests arent something that are currently produced to be used at mass scale

The not so big secret is that we can detect cancer early in a lot of people, but we also would detect a lot of not-cancer. We don't currently know the cost/benefit of that tradeoff for all these new types of screening, and therefore insurers and health systems are reluctant to pay the cost of the both screening and the subsequent workup. This is not just a financial consideration, though the financial part is a big part -- the workup for those that end up as not-cancer has non-negligible risks for the patients as well (I have had patients of mine suffer severe injury and even die from otherwise routine biopsies), and on top of that, some actual cancers may not really benefit from early discovery in the first place.

This is not to downplay the potential benefit of early cancer detection... which is huge. And in the US/UK anyway, there are ongoing large trials to try to figure some of this stuff out in the space of blood-based cancer screening, as part of the path to convincing regulatory bodies and eventual reimbursement for certain tests. As mentioned, you can currently at least get the Galleri test out of pocket (<$1k, not cheap, but not exorbitant either), as well as whole body MRIs (a bit more expensive, ~$2-5k).

Most healthy, active people who eat decently, get enough rest, and avoid drinking and smoking, will be able to eliminate cancer as it comes up. The only people who would benefit from these screenings are already unhealthy and cancer might be just one of many potential conditions they could experience—the goal of healthcare is not to dedicate an inordinate amount of resources for procedures that may amount to not much of any long term benefit.

People talk about the “immune system” but they are really referring to a number of systems the body uses to regulate itself, more or less successfully, around environmental pressures. The body is a system under tension, sometimes extreme tension leads to extreme success (success here being growth of power), sometimes it breaks the body, and sometimes the systems have been slowly failing for a while, and most treatments will not help. Medicine is only useful in the specific case where the power of the body would be promoted if not for one thing, that the body would be healthy, at least manageably so, without that issue.

> Most healthy, active people who eat decently, get enough rest, and avoid drinking and smoking, will be able to eliminate cancer as it comes up

Incorrect.

There are tons of cancers that hide and mask with symptoms common to other symptoms. Kidney cancer, for example, presents pretty similarly to both kidney stones and UTIs. Even blood in the urine isn't proof positive that anything is wrong beyond either of those conditions. And, by the time blood is in the urine, it's often too late.

Liver cancer is even worse. The first symptoms you get can be thought of as a simple pulled muscle, just a little ache in the back. By the time you have appreciable problems, like turning yellow, it's quite advanced and too late to really do much.

There are common cancers like colon, skin, breast, and prostate that more fit your description of being mostly harmless so long as you get regular screenings and eat healthy. But, for every part of the body, a cancer can form and the symptoms are very often invisible.

I'm unfortunately all too familiar with how cancer looks. My wife currently has stage 4 cancer that started as kidney cancer. She does not drink or smoke, gets enough rest, and is very active.

What's a good way for an otherwise healthy person to screen for kidney cancer, in terms of trade-offs?

Annual MRI?