alt Hacker NewsBut surely the mistake is doing the unnecessary treatment, not getting the information in the first place. In the above hypothetical where I could get an impossibly detailed full body scan result for free, I would absolutely do it.
I understand that in practice getting more information often leads to unnecessary treatment, so that in some cases the real world results are better if less investigation is done. But that's not inevitable; it depends on the choices made as a result of that information.
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You don't seem to get it. There is no free lunch in medicine, because the human body and mind would have just discovered the free lunch during evolution and made it part of the bodies' natural healing process and daily routines.
This means all treatments have tradeoffs where you accept some damage to treat other damage and in the end you are mostly converting problems the human body can't deal with into problems the human body can fix on its own.
If you do an unnecessary treatment, you end up with a tradeoff with no benefits.
In the end everything has to follow a cost and benefit model
But how do you know the unnecessary treatment isn’t necessary? There is likely always something happening in your body that would suggest an unnecessary treatment. So if you start doing scans when you have no outward reason to, you’ll always find something that looks like it needs treatment.
There’s no perfect information in medicine.
The more scans you do, the more times you’ll make the wrong choice and unnecessarily treat something.