[Nifty3929]

It's exactly these kind of issues with statistics that cause us all kinds of problems. I'm glad you pointed this one out.

It reminds me of a YT video I was watching with similar issues about cancer mortality rates. We've been doing all these treatments, and cancer survival rates have been going up. So everybody cheers about how good the treatments are. But when you control for the fact that earlier detection puts more people into the 'cancer' category earlier, causing 'cancer' people to live statistically longer from diagnosis, then the benefits of the treatments mostly go away (for many but not all types of cancer).

And these kinds of misleading issues are all throughout statistics. See Simpson's paradox, etc.

[soared]

This seems like an extremely broad brush. There are cancers that were literally untreatable and guaranteed death within years, that with treatment now can see patients living 5+ years. Lung cancer specifically, but others as well.

[LorenPechtel]

You're not rebutting his point.

Let's assume fate has decreed that patient X will die of lung cancer at 70. Detect it at 68, dies in 2 years. Detect it at 64, dies in 6 years. Your early detection "increased" survival by 200%.

And I think there's a lot to his point. Fundamentally, cancer can be divided into three groups:

1) Slow growth. Leave it alone and it probably never harms the patient. Many prostate cancers fall into this category.

2) Fast growth. These are the ones where the oncologists hitting it hard can make a real difference.

3) Fast growth/fast spread. The oncologists don't have a chance. Some tumors can be slowed.

Unfortunately, our ability to figure these out (other than in hindsight) is limited. Both of my parents died of stuff that spread rapidly, in both cases treatment was a negative. (Although there was some palliative stuff for my father.)