I get the logic, but … isn’t this failure mode the fault of the doctor, for overreacting to a minor issue/non-issue, rather than the patient for getting yearly checkups?
It may be a failure of the doctor, but we want to measure mortality in our world, not a magical one where doctors are perfect.
The takeaway here can and should be that interventions are started too soon, but that's a more difficult change than for healthy people to just reduce testing.
The issue is that doctors are biased to seeing a biased sample of human who are encountering problems. So in a way, they have to overreact always since the number of patients NOT having issues and seeing them due to the yearly checkups are way less than the number of people who are having problems.
The problem might go away if somehow we got a significant percentage of the general population to do health checkup, balancing out the unhealthy population (in meeting doctors). But that is nigh impossible, and might just overwhelm the whole doctor system altogether
Doctors are generally instructed to aim for optimal outcomes.
Suppose 98% of people taking a drug as prescribed live longer, but 2% don’t use as described and they offset the gains. Should the drug be prescribed or not?
Similarly, what if people who do annual checkups and get good numbers take worse care of themselves because their numbers are healthy?
I'm a bit mind boggled there is even a human involved here.
Lab results + Patient data = Diagnosis + Prescription
Why is there a Physician deciding if medicine is needed? The patient data from the original visit + lab should be enough, not sure why a second visit is needed. (This is only a problem because Physicians make somewhere between $250-$500/hr, if we had a market drive supply of Physicians, I don't think this question would be important)
