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Comment by zemvpferreira | Hacker News Reader

My condolences for your loss.

My own father is a physican and very against any elective exams himself. His reasoning is that his colleagues are excessively interventive so the less medicine, the better. I wish your own father had been diagnosed in time but I can see the downside in doing too many exams as well. Doctors won't be able to keep their hands off treating any little lump they find, even if it's to your detriment.

Case in point, surgery for back pain causes said pains to worsen at about the same rate as it improves them.

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While I totally understand his point about excessive intervention, ignorance is not the answer. You absolutely can say "no" to doctors.

Of course, with tests that are of themselves dangerous, that's another issue. Skip those if the risk/reward is too high.

Getting diagnosed too late is much worse than having to say no.

The concept of being a “previvor” I first came across in The Gene is worrying to me as well — finding you have a correlated but not actionable association with a disease or other poor medical outcome. I think the “just say no” underplays the challenges that can come from unactionable information.

Both are valid concerns. But I feel that "dying of something that could have been treated, if found earlier" trumps both.

That partly comes from the liability / malpractice system of the USA. They are induced to jump on everything so they don't get sued by malpractice lawsuits. The amount of detrimental behavior in medical system driven by this stuff is extremely saddening and if you know doctors, how much they think / worry about this stuff is so fucking annoying and sad.

What you do when you find something out is still a choice. If that backpain isn't getting in the way of most of your lifestyle then the risks of a surgery aren't justified. A lump in the pancreas well I think most of us would be better served by finding that out earlier than later.

I agree, often having more information is worse because you notice things and over react to things that would otherwise go unnoticed and fix them self.

I noticed this first when tracking sleep data, but it can also be applied to many other areas were humans try fix small problems but tend to make things worse.

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