I call bullshit on this. I had a very rare heart condition that was discovered during one of my yearly check ups. Chasing the root cause led us to even more scarier findings.
How many examples of bad outcomes would it take to retract your "bullshit" assessment?
Ideally, somebody would take all the good that came from the checkups, and compare that to the amount of bad effects where poor interventions were chosen, and weigh them out. Such a study would be quite useful...
I’m pretty sure bad outcomes out number good ones. Were there bad outcomes because of an incompetent provider or a test with high false positives? I’m pretty sure it’s the former.
As always, population-level recommendations don’t result in perfect individual recommendations. Your condition was very rare, and the test is not perfect. Thus if it were done routinely, many people would be flagged as a false positive and treated unnecessarily to catch your one case.
Sure, if we are dropping anecdotes, my kids were over diagnosed/incorrectly diagnosed. It ended up costing me slightly under 1 thousand dollars before other doctors said 'no big deal'.
The weirdest part about these, both of the diagnosis seemed like there was no possible solution, so even with the confirmatory tests, it wasn't like anything was going to change.
However they were insistent of getting multiple specialists on it.
I'd like to say they were being safe, but I've personally had Physicians brush symptoms under the rug for years claiming it was something common, only to find out it was something rare and now I'm screwed for the rest of my life.
Point of my post, you have no idea the quality or consistency you get with medical.
With kids it's problematic. A doctor will see thousands of kids with acute nothing burgers and then one day a kid with emergent type 1 diabetes will come in. Another bad thing is rate conditions are rare and there are a f'ckton of them.
What bothers me is at least in the US we've forced doctors to adopt an MBA driven pop mass manufacturing system. Like they're some schmuck in a chicken factory.
Ideally, somebody would take all the good that came from the checkups, and compare that to the amount of bad effects where poor interventions were chosen, and weigh them out. Such a study would be quite useful...