Reading path
Reading Cancer Screening and Early Detection
Screening promises to catch cancer early, but every test also finds disease that would never have caused harm. This path builds the core screening tradeoff, then walks through how breast, colorectal, lung, and prostate guidelines apply it, and how to judge new blood tests and whole-body scans. It is for readers who want to make sense of a screening recommendation instead of reacting to the word cancer.
The path, step by step
Begin with the central tradeoff of early detection against overdiagnosis, the idea that every later article depends on.
See that tradeoff turned into a concrete decision as a panel weighs benefits and harms into a starting age.
3 Why a BI-RADS 4 Mammogram Is Not a Diagnosis
4 min readFollow a positive mammogram downstream to learn what a suspicious screen result actually means for a patient.
Compare competing tests for one cancer, learning how a guideline chooses between colonoscopy and stool-based options.
Read the landmark randomized trials behind lung screening and meet the number needed to screen as a plain measure of benefit.
6 Why PSA Prostate Screening Is a Shared Decision
4 min readMeet a case where benefit and harm are close enough that the evidence points to a shared decision rather than a blanket rule.
Make overdiagnosis concrete by seeing how better imaging finds thyroid cancers that never needed finding.
Bring the screening bar to a new frontier and ask what evidence a multi-cancer blood test must clear before it earns trust.
End with scanning the healthy, applying everything learned to judge whether whole-body imaging helps or mostly generates worry.
Each step is a full article on the Reading the Evidence blog.