Data isn’t necessarily good because medicine and biology are messy and inaccurate. I just went through a scare myself with elevated markers on a typical blood panel. Lots of fuss, anxiety, and cost for zero gain. At the end, I learned that human bodies vary so much that we’re was just no way to know upfront if a finding was a concern or if my body was just on a tail end of a bell curve. Turns out, if you fully scan people, we all have lumps, bumps, and various anomalies. How much do you spend “treating” and investigating this stuff? I wasted my own time and precious time with doctors for nothing, increasing costs to society as a whole.

That kind of data, the costs, we have tons of. That’s why pretty much every medical association regardless of culture has limits on recommended screenings.

I think the same thing.

That said, I think engineers seem to believe other careers should use logic in a straightforward fashion, but they are more complicated.

For example, lawyers cannot use logic in the same way, because the court can almost arbitrarily say some facts must be ignored.

In the same way, medicine has the hippocratic oath. It is "do no harm". It is not "find the cause" or "cure the patient".

It seems doctors have made their peace with this and are aligned with it, since the overwhelming majority 88% have do-not-resuscitate orders for themselves.

Are you prepared to make the decision, "I have cancer but statistically it has a relatively low likelihood of killing me before I would die of other causes, so I won't do anything about it"?

Are most people?

If you're male and live to over 60, you are going to be in this camp regarding the PSA and intervention for Prostate Cancer. Two GPs, a Urologist and an Epidemiologist (none of whom know each other btw) have all said to me "you will die with this not of this" because they can trace the dynamics of my presentation.

Enhanced imaging and blood tests alone didn't do this: their intuition based on progression and behaviour of the system as a whole did.

Treat the person, have a longterm relationship with your health provider.

There is a spectrum between invasive treatment and not doing anything.

You could have a scan 3 months later and if there is no progression the doctor schedule a scan 6 months later and then 12 months... If there is a progression he schedule an appointmentwith an oncologist.

The problem is that once the odds of benefiting from early detection is low enough, and the rate of a given condition is low enough, it takes very little for other things to dominate.

E.g. how many of them end up leading to unnecessary biopsies, or scans that are themselves introducing a risk?

For any condition there will be a threshold where too much screening becomes harmful because you're doing so many unnecessary tests that rare errors / accidents come to dominate the benefits.

The question isn't if there's a threshold where more scans do more harm than good, but where it is.

For some things, increased screening will be unambiguously good. For some it takes work to figure it out.

It might provide enough impetus for getting you to avoid sugar and processed meats though.

Has avoiding those things been shown to stop existing cancer? I thought those foods just increased the chance of getting cancer in the first place. But I'm totally ignorant here, it sounds plausible that some carcinogens work by worsening cancer which would otherwise have been benign, I just haven't heard about that

Depending on the type of cancer, there are correlations with diet changes and slowing growth of cancer. Causation isn't known yet, with the speculations about reasons veganism works I've seen all refuted. Low carb effects seems about increasing ketones and reducing glucose levels in the blood, which I think is being studied with some lung cancers. Type of cancer is important, with different diet changes positively correlated different with cancers not returning (and the wrong change could possibly even promote growth, as different cancers 'feed' on different things). Prostate, breast and lung cancer I'm aware of there being these correlations.

If your are choosing not to do anything based on the data, gathering the data is objectively a net negative. There are financial costs related to taking the tests as well as emotion costs related to false positives and even with deciding not to act with possibly true positives.

There needs to be a net positive action on a subset of the cases to outweigh the costs of gathering and sharing the data.

Most data is crap, and you generally can't tell where the needle in the haystack is.

Having more consistency between doctors would already be a change needed to actually use data. You will find it matters more than you'd like. We can't all have the best doctors, but we could use data to level the outcomes.