An unprecedented window into how diseases take hold years before symptoms appear

(www.bloomberg.com)

202 points helsinkiandrew | 2 comments | 18 Jul 25 08:55 UTC | HN request time: 0.403s | source

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briandoll ◴[22 Jul 25 17:42 UTC] No.44650590[source]▶

And yet not a single doctor in the United States will permit you to care about early signals, preventative medicine, or routine deep dive bloodwork, in order to stave off those diseases. Anyone who's on top of this is paying fully out of pocket for individual tests, screenings, medicines. Manageable for some, unattainable for most.

replies(2): >>44651294 #>>44651750 #

1. datpuz ◴[22 Jul 25 19:16 UTC] No.44651750[source]▶

>>44650590 #

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't do it.

replies(1): >>44657138 #

2. rkangel ◴[23 Jul 25 09:08 UTC] No.44657138[source]▶

>>44651750 (TP) #

I had not heard the "CT scans cause 5% of cancers [in the US]" stat before, it makes for interesting reading. That's incredibly high!

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