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Better off? Financially? Lifespan? Mortality —All cause or breast cancer specific?

I think your question is more about prospective vs. retrospective.

Placebo controlled double blind prospective trials are the most definitive and by far the most expensive.

But they’re not always appropriate.

Suppose I have a treatment that prevents death from all causes and can even reverse death from any cause if used shortly after death.

How do I prove it works? If I keep the treatment to myself and wait until I’m 250 years old to share it, surely people will believe…but is that proof?

Suppose I give it to my family and friends and we all live to ages exceeding 200, but some die by car/boat/plane crash and the treatment can’t be applied. Is that proof?

Suppose I make the treatment fully available to anyone who wants it. And 50 years later we notice the number of humans claiming to be age 100-130 years old start to explode, but we also see plenty of people dying between 70-90. I would argue this is not proof, but it is good enough.

Suppose we put everyone in the world on this treatment and 100 years go by and the annual rate of death per drops from 750 per 100,000 to 10 per 100,000…I would argue this isn’t proof, but it is also good enough.

So how would we genuinely prove effectiveness of my treatment? Well, in a world where anyone and everyone can have it if they desire, we find volunteers or enslave/imprison people and assign some of them to the control group and others to the treatment group. Wait until 100% of one group is dead and then tell the world our results. I would argue this is proof but is evil to do to humans.

MAHDOOD 8mo ago

I was thinking better off in terms of health but I guess you could say financially too.

Breast cancer therapeutics industry is estimated to be worth about 34 billion and projected to double in less than 10 years. These placebo controlled trials are expensive but that’s not an excuse. There is plenty of money to do a study like that. But they don’t want to because this is their cash cow. I think you’d agree with me that this industry has incentive to diagnose and treat more breast cancer patients.

“So how would we genuinely prove effectiveness of my treatment? Well, in a world where anyone and everyone can have it if they desire, we find volunteers or enslave/imprison people and assign some of them to the control group and others to the treatment group. Wait until 100% of one group is dead and then tell the world our results. I would argue this is proof but is evil to do to humans.”

Based on your own words, you are admitting there isn’t any real scientific proof these mammograms are effective.

I agree with what you are saying for the most part. I guess where we diverge is your claim that it is evil or unethical to have a control group. It was considered “evil and/or unethical” to leave schizophrenics untreated in the past. So they did lobotomies on them instead. Doing that today would be considered evil. See how that becomes problematic? What is considered evil or unethical can change and we can’t be so confident that we are immune to making similar errors.

The medical field consistently starts with a presumption that treatment is necessary before finding any real evidence through experiments. Imagine 100 years from now, we are on a bitcoin standard and we’ve flushed out all the fiat funding and government influence from the medical field. Can you imagine a scenario where the medical field, in a free market, finds a different way to diagnose breast cancer without radiation. This new diagnostic tool becomes the standard and they find that the rate of breast cancer diagnoses has actually gone down because of this less harmful diagnostic measure? In this scenario the world may look back at our time period as insane for using radiation, the same way we look back at doctors doing lobotomies on schizophrenics.

Just some food for thought. Thanks for indulging me in this conversation it was very interesting and civil 🫡

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