The REAL Cure for Cancer

Surprised that the impact of radiation dose from certain exams was not mentioned. One hand, if you have symptoms of cancer and need imaging in order to know how to be treated, the risk/reward is very obviously worthwhile. On the other hand, if you do a PET scan every day, just in case, your risk of developing a cancer from the scans themself will eventually get quite high, and the tradeoff is not worth it. Presumably somewhere in between is an optimal balance of testing frequently enough to catch anything early but testing infrequently enough to avoid making the overall risk of cancer significantly higher.

How often it is worth doing certain tests (evaluated by just the risk of causing cancer and the likelihood of detecting cancer earlier than you would have without testing) depends a lot on what those curves look like. This definitely deserves a mention.