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.
Yeah, could be a cohort that’s biased by its nature, there’s also conditions like prostate cancer where the net impact of unnecessary treatment as a result of the inability to determine what needs to be treated exceeds the benefit of discovery during routine checkups. You get into the issue of what’s the greatest benefit to the public as a whole versus what a given individual might want. So discovery of the impact as a whole may not provide a publicly accepted policy prescription. Look into PSA testing disussions.
It’s been some time back since I saw that outcome study, but similar studies usually assume that in the cases where there’s no routine preventive checks, conditions ARE treated when they become symptomatic.
Here’s an article on improper use of preventive services. https://www.acpm.org/page/pschoosingwisely
Excellent points.