There’s some interesting studies that appear to show that “preventive care” on bulk actually has a negative impact on health outcomes.
Interesting. As an amateur statistician with an interest in sciences I’d like to see those studies. It could be that people seeking “preventive care” already have an underlying condition or suspicion of one, thus the outcomes are worse. But I’d be just speculating.
In theory, preventive care if properly followed up and treated should result in better outcomes. The theory being you catch diseases early enough to treat. It’s anecdotal, but the missus had a routine exam and they saw something odd so followed it up with more rigorous tests. What they saw turned out to be nothing - but the follow up uncovered something quite serious in a totally different location - but very early. Spared us all a lot of heartache. So we consider ourselves lucky to be so unlucky.
But as everything, garbage in garbage out. These studies could have any number of built in biases. And I mean bias in the statistical and scientific sense not as a judgement of any kind. There are many kinds of biases that can be built into any study especially post hoc studies.