[nihonde]

Well, you've reduced a rational position to absurdity here. The concern isn't that someone is going to require chemotherapy. The concern is that an asymptomatic condition will go undisclosed until it is symptomatic, at which point preventative treatments are futile.

Even if we accepted your example, there is a fundamental inconsistency, since doctors in America regularly prescribe very serious drug interventions for patients who essentially self-diagnose for being neurotic/adhd/etc.--actually a much worse problem than the one you're so eager to curtail.

[hawkice]

There exist both type I and type II errors, yes. But it's not absurdity, the South Korean Thyroid Cancer "epidemic" is one of the classic examples of the dangers of using traditional treatments on the lower-severity cases more advanced scanning uncovers. It was a public health disaster with lifelong consequences for those impacted, and was, legitimately, people getting cancer treatment for small cancers so harmless that they would have died of something else before becoming symptomatic.