[ryan_n]

I don’t understand how you’re concluding that the biopsy shouldn’t have happened from that anecdote? Just because a test result is negative doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t have happened. That’s not how practicing medicine works.

[gcanyon]

Hence the N=1 I started the statement with. If we had a thousand similar situations and it turned out that in, say, 1% of cases there was a lung tumor, then we could debate whether it's worth putting 990 people through a biopsy they don't need so 10 can find out they have a tumor. Maybe that gives us the opportunity to discuss waiting a month and taking another chest x-ray (which has its own negatives) vs. doing an immediate biopsy.

But we don't have 1000 similar cases. As I said, we have 1: mine. And it turned out negative. So 1 person was put through a biopsy they didn't need, and 0 people found out they have a tumor.

Hopefully that makes my point clearer.