This just increases your risk of a complication. If you have a disease with no symptoms, it's probably not time to try and treat it. Treatment has risks, after all. (Think about all the people that have some minor problem, get minor surgery, and then pick up MRSA in the hospital while they're recovering. Now they have a major problem.)
I thought that was covered by the "go to the doctor" bit. The doctor would, if even remotely competent, verify the presence of a disease before beginning treatment.
For all the hoopla I keep hearing be attributed to malice regarding 23andMe's results, honestly, I think the results, at the least, encourage people to go to the doctor.
My father-in-law was diagnosed with cancer a couple of years ago, but because he was regular with checkups, they were able to catch it early, and he's been in remission for over a year.
A false positive by 23andMe regarding one's predisposition towards cancer should motivate them to the doctor more often, which would indicate whether they were or were not cancer positive -- but in the event of either, I'd wager that more frequent trips to the doctor would be a net benefit.
>verify the presence of a disease before beginning treatment
Right, but there is a cost for that. If you have a disease that isn't causing any symptoms, do you treat it, even though it will probably never cause symptoms? There is a risk in all treatments, some more than others. There is a study that most prostate cancers don't show symptoms, ever and our super sensitive cancer diagnostics tests are causing more harm than good. More diagnostics does not mean more good.
For everybody who believes their doctor, there's somebody who doesn't and will just find a new doctor to confirm their self-diagnosis. "I was right, my doctor was wrong" stories get posted to HN fairly frequently.
"fairly frequently" is still, in this context, within the general margin of error for any statistically sound sample size.
Yes, people disagree with their doctors, and yes, sometimes those doctors are wrong, but by and large, the number of people with multiple doctors in agreement, where that agreement is still wrong, are statistical outliers.
Further, and maybe it's just me here, I've learned a lot in this thread already, and I'm not an expert on the subject, but I just fail to see how the idea that I have a higher predisposition to cancer than the statistical norm, even if that information might be wrong, can be harmful.
I mean, I understand the objective, and the idea of preventing the sale of snake oil is one that I see as vlid in this context, but this isn't that. 23andMe doesn't make any curative claims whatsoever, as much as to announce that "hey, there might be snakes." They're far more scientifically sound than a mood ring, but even if they aren't, I just don't personally see the harm in that.
