Can a doctor reliably tell when a prostate cancer is likely to become dangerous?
The problem then is, if you rename the "grade 1" condition "prostate dysplasia", some fraction of patients don't do the follow-ups, and then those misclassifications are a big deal. But if you don't rename it, some fraction of patients get unnecessary treatment that lowers their quality of life.
So it's an interesting dilemma.
If the population who do _not_ actually have serious cancer is orders of magnitudes larger than those who do then there will be far more people in the false positive group than the true positive group and thus the vast majority of operations will be unnecessary.
The key here is how we manage the positive ones. And this is where the current system fails. We have yet to find a good way to manage them without doing unnecessary treatments causing more harm than good.
But instead of fixing this problem, we opted to stop screening. Which, for me, sounds stupid. But it sure is easier to do.
A pandemic is different, there the goal is to optimize the outcome for the population.
Applying the latter to the former is at the very least cynical. The opposite is what got us anti-mask and anti-vaxxers.
Also, especially with cancer, people tend to be so affraid of the diagnosis, they look for excuses to not be examined. As if cancer onpy pops up when it is found or something. Which is stupid, if ypu have cancer you want to know as early as possible.
I have no idea where you're going here. Wearing masks and getting vaccinated benefit both the individual and the population. (That actually contributed to it being politicized -- your choices affect my chances of getting a nasty disease).
At the individual level, you wear a mask when appropriate and get vaccinated, then you're less likely to get the disease and it's likely to be less severe if you do. Likewise, the population benefits from less disease spread, and less strain on the healthcare system as many of these cases become outpatient "take some Paxlovid" type deals.
Where is there any sort of basis for anti-mask and anti-vax theology here?
E.g. PSA (a blood value, easy to measure), if increasing very slowly over a long timeframe, is a good indicator that you may have cancer but that it is growing really slow, aka unlikely to be aggressive and to be an immediate problem. While a quick increase tells you the opposite.
Then there is DNA sequencing of cancer samples from a Biopsy. Which is evolving rapidly and should be soon cheap enough to be available at scale.