The REAL Cure for Cancer

Hi! This is amazing content, and it is very impressive work! I agree that medical paternalism is obnoxious as well. 

The one thing I would be careful about is thinking about cancer detection in terms of true positives and false positives. Let’s say that money no longer existed, and we started screening everyone for cancer. This would sound wonderful (my mom has Stage 4 cancer, and it would have helped her). Now let’s say that the “accuracy of the test” is 90% and that 1% of people (3 million Americans) have cancer yearly. Using Bayes’s Theorem for probability means that the probability of having cancer, given that the scanner sees it, is approximately 15%, again assuming everyone is screened regardless of any indication they otherwise have cancer. Meaning 85% of people who have a positive result in this situation would not have cancer. Some percentage of these people would go on to surgery, and some of these healthy people may die on the surgery table. In this situation, more people may die from false positives than from cancer itself. This is what makes early detection so hard.