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by briandear 2817 days ago
So the president of the American Heart Association as well as doctors at Stanford are all masking the “horror” of your resident wife?

You know what’s worse than a false positive? A real positive and no way to know about it.

1 comments

On an individual basis, yes. Across a population, not necessarily.

If the false positives result in investigations that carry medical risk then it's possible that on the whole, more harm than good is done.

There's also an interesting consideration around real positives that we've never detected in the past and that never presented any symptoms or negative outcomes. It's possible that we now start detecting cases which previously the patient went their whole life without knowing about and would be totally unaffected by, and introducing medical interventions that have downsides.

How it all stacks up in the end we can't possibly know, but this development isn't automatically "good".