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David Crowe commented on the blog post Now Scott Walker Wants To Kill Women With Cancer
I hate to break up a party but while Walker is pond scum cancer screening is stupid. The reason is simple mathematics. Imagine you’re looking for a disease that will be found in 1/1000 people, which is normal, particularly with annual screening where hopefully you only find a fatal condition once in someone’s life. And let’s say the test is 99% accurate, which is generous. This means that if you screen 1000 people you will find one true positive and 10 false positives. Some of the 10 false positives may just suffer biopsies and radiation before being discovered but some may continue to be treated as true positives (i.e. people who have the disease) leading to radiation, chemotherapy and surgery for people who do not have a fatal condition. If the left was truly progressive they would be opposing the industrial forces that are imposing more and more screening on us, making billions of dollars in screening and billions more in false treatment, rather than encouraging industrial medicine to make more profits. I’m Canadian and think that health care should be free for everyone, but what we have is medical treatment with massive profits and no improvement in health.
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David Crowe became a registered member
