My father, a respected general surgeon and an acute reader of the medical literature, claimed that almost all the studies on early detection of cancer confuse degree of disease at time of detection with "early detection". That is, a typical study assumes that a small cancer must have been caught early, and thus count it as a win for early detection.
An obvious alternate explanation is that fast-growing malignant cancers are likely to kill you even in the unlikely case that you are able detect them before they are large, whereas slow-growing beni... (read more)
My father, a respected general surgeon and an acute reader of the medical literature, claimed that almost all the studies on early detection of cancer confuse degree of disease at time of detection with "early detection". That is, a typical study assumes that a small cancer must have been caught early, and thus count it as a win for early detection.
An obvious alternate explanation is that fast-growing malignant cancers are likely to kill you even in the unlikely case that you are able detect them before they are large, whereas slow-growing beni... (read more)