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"Some cancer specialists counter these concerns, saying the surge in diagnoses is primarily a surge in detecting cancers that did not need to be found..."
This seems excessively paternalistic. If medical professionals hold a legal monopoly on providing diagnostic care, then decide it's better to just not diagnose things, it leaves patients with no way to discover life-altering information about their own health.
If the cancer is not clinically significant, then its not life-altering information.
Essentially they are saying that many of these diagnoses are potentially false positives. To the point where detecting them might be more harmful then not. Keep in mind most cancer treatments are pretty harsh. They are better than cancer, but if you don't have clinically significant cancer then the treatments can be very not worth it.
Then here's an idea: instead of hiding that information, you can explain it to the patient.
You have no authority to treat your patient like a child.
disclosing information is not a medically neutral act. Knowing you have a medical condition can create a great deal of anxiety and anguish and prompt lots of tests. If the result of all those tests and anxiety is "no action indicated," you've basically given your patient a condition that reduces their quality of life for no upside.
I once had a misdiagnosis of an incurable illness that I didn't actually have, and the stress of dealing with that caused me to develop another, very real medical condition that took a year to get under control.
Hypothetically (totally made up numbers), if a positive result on the test means there is 1/10000 chance you have cancer, and negative result means a 1/20000 chance, with the test also having a 1/1000 chance of giving the patient an adverse reaction, i think the questions most patients would ask is why was the test run in the first place?
We're not talking about hiding information, we're talking about not looking for it in the first place. Information that is costly to acquire but not actionable once acquired.
This is a "why don't you just" answer. The reason the establishment does this is that we know the outcome of telling people is worse than not telling them. This is an expensive lesson learned over over a century of medical treatment.
That could be true, but it isn't, since we don't always know at the individual level if a specific tumor is harmless at the moment of diagnosis.
You could say the same thing about diagnosing cancer via astrology.
A test that with low specificity is simply not a useful test.
> we don't always know at the individual level if a specific tumor is harmless at the moment of diagnosis.
You didn't know prior to the test either.
We don't know if a tumor is harmless, but we do know that treatment has significant harm. Radiation and chemotherapy are nasty. We also know that the stress of a positive diagnosis has significant harm.
First do no harm.
I agree. I wouldn't contest "cancers that did not need to be treated", but this would imply finding, following, and deciding if the tumor needs treatment.
Not needing to be found sounds like cost saving, leave that to the accountants.
There is cancer in your body every single day. Your immune system handles it just fine. There is an explicit difference between cancer that needs treating and cancer that should be ignored because it's a waste of time and resources to treat. You're not a doctor, you're not qualified to tell the difference, you're not trained on cancers, you're not even in the medical field. The monopoly is held for exactly this reason.
We already have an extreme shortage of available healthcare workers. We don't need to stress them further because 20% of the population suddenly decides they need 80 elective surgeries to remove things that would've gone away or stayed benign on their own.
My father has a high rate PSA change a few years ago so I learned everything I could about prostate cancer for about 4 weeks.
I then talked to several doctors I know (family practice and two internal medicine).
It was embarrassing how little they knew. And even more shocking actually, is how wrong they were about things.
Two of them told me the risk of infection from a prostate biopsy was basically zero. I asked for clarification with actual numbers, and even led them with "for what kind? Like 1 in 100 or 1 in 1000?"
One said basically zero, the other said 1 in a million.
Neither knew to mention the two common types, and to make sure we go with the one type that carries less risk of infection.
Even then, the less risky one is about 1 in 1000. If you have bad insurance you might go with the older type which is about 1 in 100. And that's with them giving you antibiotics beforehand....
Basically they got everything I asked about wrong compared to specialists you can read online.
Ps, my dad got an MRI with two 1cm growths.
He changed his diet and added fasts, and did nothing else. His doctor basically writing him off in anger.
5 years later, PSA lower than before the incident. Paid for a scan last year, zero growth.
Internet/YouTube experts/doctors really do beat most general doctors. The odds of you having someone in the top 10% of their field, let alone top 1-2% in your local town is pretty low. Even my bay area doctor friends work at pretty basic general bay area hospitals. Imagine who's left in Modesto, CA.
I'm glad your dad got better, it had nothing to do with his diet and fasting. It's no different than Steve Jobs stubbornly becoming a fruititarian to treat his cancer. If his immune system had fought it off, then fruit would be a cancer cure and all his doctors would be idiots.
Youtube/Internet experts are one of the largest propagators of medical misinformation and are actively harming people every day, and if I've ever been in favor of restricting free speech, it's giving out medical advice without a license. If we can restrict giving legal advice, and everyone understands how painfully stupid you'd have to be to represent yourself in court without a law degree, then we can restrict giving medical advice, and hopefully people can realize how painfully stupid you'd have to be to manage your own medical treatments without a medical degree.
Your response is a non-sequitur. The original statement was about intentionally not detecting cancer. You are talking about whether the cancer is medically necessary to treat.
You are just assuming that all cancer must be treated if detected, even if it is medically unnecessary, therefore we must not detect medically insignificant cancer which would be net harmful to treat. You can detect things and determine no action should be taken. I can understand if that might be the modern standard of care, but if so then that is the problem; not early detection of cancer, which could be medically insignificant, but which may also allow the early detection of medically significant cancer.
What determines if a cancer should be treated is the type, size, growth, and age of a patient.
Type and size and growth you can't find out without doing some sort of test/screening.
I agree that oncologists are ultimately who should be making the call on what needs to be treated and how. But I think your characterization of how common non-dangerous tumors are is off.
> We already have an extreme shortage of available healthcare workers. We don't need to stress them further because 20% of the population suddenly decides they need 80 elective surgeries to remove things that would've gone away or stayed benign on their own.
Strawman. No one is suggesting adding extra stress to healthcare workers. It's also not you or your doctors call to make: let's gatekeep this patients cancer because our hospital can't deal with the workload. What a truly wicked idea.
To help alleviate the extreme shortage of available healthcare workers we should instead allow those wanting to pay for these elective surgeries, to pay for them! Drive money into healthcare, scale up treatments, drive money into research. Let the system work.
Don't just turn off the lights and shut the door.
> You're not a doctor, you're not qualified to tell the difference, you're not trained on cancers, you're not even in the medical field. The monopoly is held for exactly this reason.
The idea that a position of authority means ~anything~ anymore is completely ridiculous.
What did the medical field do to earn such credibility with you? Any intelligent person should have developed a high degree of skepticism regarding the operations of the medical field as of 2025.
At a population level, that makes sense.
But, as the article notes, we don't know if any particular cancer will kill an individual.
It's a conundrum. But, "Meh, let's not test since it might not kill you." doesn't feel like the right answer.
People have a right to make their own medical choices. Saying on people with the correct credentials should have input is offensive.
That's kind of like saying that there is diabetes in your body every single day, and your body handles it just fine by producing insulin. Obviously that statement is nonsensical and essentially devoid of any useful insight.
I'm not even going to comment on this: "You're not a doctor, you're not qualified to tell the difference", because this is such a weird statement that I don't understand how anybody could utter it on this website.
If that is your standard for critical thinking, you are paving the way for anti-science rhetoric to dominate public discourse.
Treat people like stupid idiots if you want but then don't be surprised by the way they vote in elections as a result.
> you're not in the medical field
citation needed
I've seen every single professional field go through boom and bust cycles over the course of my life except one.
It is my dearest dream to see a single bust in the MD profession.
>> If medical professionals hold a legal monopoly on providing diagnostic care, then decide it's better to just not diagnose things
They said detecting. Diagnosing is "hey, somethings wrong or odd, what is going on." Detecting is looking for something you otherwise may not ever notice. Not a doctor, just offering my definitions of two different words being used here.
The rise in the preventative screening centers (such as prenuvo) that offer whole body MRIs will be interesting.
The research seems split on if it is worth it or just causes unneeded worry. Obviously if you catch something early then that is great, but there are a lot of people who have a ton of followup testing only to find out there is no issue.
There are also limitations with the level of detail a full body MRI can capture.
I could see it becoming similar to a colonoscopy where you get it like when you turn 30 or something and then every 5-10 years after that.
As part of my post-cancer screening, I have received a full-body MRI every year since 2017. In 2024, it discovered pancreatic cancer. Grateful for those years where it found nothing, but even MORE grateful when it did catch something!
"The rise in early-onset cancer incidence does not consistently signal a rise in the occurrence of clinically meaningful cancer. While some of the increase in early-onset cancer is likely clinically meaningful, it appears small and limited to a few cancer sites. Much of the increase appears to reflect increased diagnostic scrutiny and overdiagnosis. Interpreting rising incidence as an epidemic of disease may lead to unnecessary screening and treatment while also diverting attention from other more pressing health threats in young adults" [1].
[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/articl...
>The problem is that it is impossible to know if someone’s cancer will be deadly or not.
And that is the issue, I know 2 people who developed cancers when they were around 40, one died, the other person survived but had to be treated. So we close our eyes and hope for the best ?
And I'm sure neither were one of the cancers discussed in the article as candidates for lower screening. Nobody's suggesting we stop looking for lung cancer or any of the other many deadly ones. OTOH, increased screening for thyroid cancer had 0 impact on life expectancy in South Korea.
They ARE suggesting such things (including forms of "not looking") even for deadly ones. In these cases, it is couched in terms of what follow-up is "deemed necessary" (see later) depending on stage classification of that cancer. There is a range of responses that's possible and new research and procedure advancement coming online on a 5-yearly basis in addition to variations in capabilities from hospital to hospital - so a pretty volatile environment - yet the staging recommendation gets changed often based on what health care professionals estimate they can sustain society-wide - i.e. manpower - rather than what might be optimal from a survival point of view for that patient.
To pick one specific example, skin cancer visual screening seems currently recommended on a frequency based not on the speed of evolution of, say, melanoma - which can start and evolve pretty fast -, but on the manpower availability of dermatologists.
The term is incidentaloma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incidental_imaging_finding
The argument against screening is kind of like if you had a really inept fire department that ended up crashing the firetruck into other vehicles and buildings every time they were dispatched... and instead of figuring out how to have the fire department respond to calls in a better and safer way, you ban smoke detectors because then the fire department will only be called after buildings are confirmed to be already engulfed in flames.
Medical reasoning is complex. It typically needs to consider second and third order effects (typically, how the public responds to a policy needs to be considered when updating the policy). It can't simply attempt to maximize the global health utility function (ethics, budgets, politics, and human behavior all get in the way).
If your reaction to something like this is an offhand "why don't you just...", or "experts don't matter", or "my grandma told me not to eat sugar because it feeds cancer", please, take a deep breath, and think twice before starting to argue with folks about this.
Consuming foods rich in antioxidants may help. "Research suggests that free radical molecules can add to the risk of health issues linked to aging. Some examples are heart disease, age-related macular degeneration, Alzheimer's disease and cancer." https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-h...
On the other hand, it's known that consuming the antioxidant vitamin E actually promotes the progression of lung cancer. Cancer cells are under oxidative stress so antioxidants can help them survive and grow.
Just goes to show that biology is WAY more complicated than "if you want to prevent X then do Y" - especially at microbilogical scale. Genes influence each other for example, so by up- or downregulating stuff you are interfering in a highly complex, non-linear system with complex consequences.
Just look at this example of a gene regulation network: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Different-visualizations...
The Vitamin E / NAC relationship are interesting. As far as I understand, there needs to be a balance of anti-oxidants (C, E, Selenium, etc). To make it worse there are so many formulations of Vitamin E you can buy (tocopherols, tocotrienols, etc). Sometimes its hard to tell from the studies what forms exactly were being used.
You may also find this interesting:
"NRF2 activation is a predictor of poor clinical outcomes in lung cancer. Given the widespread use of NRF2-inducing compounds such as resveratrol and sulforaphane, these findings raise important concerns about their safety in individuals at risk for or living with cancer."
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11357-025-01736-0
Many people eat high-sulforaphane containing foods for health benefits.
And finally from last week https://newatlas.com/diet-nutrition/vitamin-c-air-pollution-...
This was about 1000mg / day for humans.
Very interesting breakdown from Medlife crisis discussing this: https://youtu.be/BJ9soFmzYO8
The term cancer refers to hundreds of different tumors with widely various prognosis. The type and especially the differentiation play the crucial role. Such statistics are difficult to present.
In the case of autism the scientists believed that it increased lately but more careful research showed that this was due to early diagnosis.
“Dr. Welch said the number of unnecessary diagnoses could be lessened if doctors did less routine testing — and if doctors held back from pursuing every abnormality in asymptomatic patients.”
I pity this doctor’s patients
Surely it has nothing to do with the proliferation of chemicals and microplastics into the ecosystem, water, food, etc. That would be absurd, after all, a Monsanto-sponsored study found that their pesticides are totally safe.
It's from a dramatic rise in inactive lifestyles by younger people and a lot of sitting, with the predictable consequences. Behavior which would have been far less common before mass adoption of video games and personal computing in the home, and then everybody sitting/laying around their homes with their smartphones. Young people go out less, they have a lot less sex, they're far less social in-person. It all goes together.
These people under 50 were the first generation to sit around at home for long periods of time playing video games. The NES came out in 1985-86 in the US and home video gaming has been mass adopted since. From there add on the full adoption of sitting down at a computer for work in offices across the 1980s and 1990s. Then throw in the full adoption of home computing in the 1990s with Win3 & Win95 + GUI. And for the past 20 years, throw in the smartphone.
It's the sitting primarily, hours and hours of it every day.
I don’t drink, I never smoked, I eat clean, I run, I swim, I go to the gym. But I’m also at my desk for 13 hours a day on average and I think it will kill me one day. Trying to stand as much as possible but it’s not always possible,
> It's the sitting primarily, hours and hours of it every day
...do you have a source for this causative link? It would seem like it's highly testable.