[searine]

There has been a lot of talk the last several years about the risks of screening, but in my opinion people have taken this as an opportunity to swing in the opposite extreme. The message shouldn't be "get screened" in the same way the message shouldn't be "if you get screened you're more likely to die".

Not all screening is equal. MRIs for low-back pain often lead to diagnoses of disease followed by unnecessary surgery with high risks. This has led to a reluctancy to prescribe MRIs or other imaging. However, with something like cancer, timing is everything. Months/weeks/days matter and catching a cancer early via a broad screen can be the difference between life and death.

In the case of the galleri test, risk is low and many of the errors can be caught with a re-testing or other non-invasive screen. If my test came back positive I wouldn't be jumping straight into chemo, but would probably get a bunch of bloodwork and some imaging.

At the end of the day, I would much much much rather go through some unnecessary scans due to a false positive than miss a easy to treat cancer because I was scared of the screening risk.