alt Hacker News> daily cancer scans instead of one every few years
Silly nitpick: the reason we don’t do daily cancer scans isn’t the cost, it’s the false positive rate. Invasive procedures like biopsies come with complications like infections that happen at a higher rate and do more damage than the cancer that doesn’t even exist. This dilemma is pervasive in medicine, because our tests aren’t perfect but the thing they’re testing for is rare.
The whole paradigm changes, though, when you can do daily cancer scans. You don't get a biopsy when the scan shows a lump. You get a biopsy after a couple weeks of daily scans showing the lump growing. Plus, having all the data from the daily scans improves your testing accuracy so false positives and negatives are more rare.