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Yep, I have experience with both. It found cancer for my wife and she was able to treat it immediately. Fully recovered.

It found a weird spot on me that turned out to a pancreatic rest.

The only reason we did the scans were because we were making a significant life decision that we didn’t want to have to backtrack if either got diagnosed with cancer within a year . We knew nothing was guaranteed but we wanted to do some tests.

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> You're finding something that never would have caused you any problem in your life

Is it though? Isn't it possible you could be early-detecting something serious that is much easier to treat now vs when symptoms appear?

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Yes, you could early-detect something, but the likelihood of this thing being life-threatening are extremely low. If you choose to manage this thing aggressively anyway, you have to undergo more invasive testing (e.g., biopsies, surgery, anesthesia, etc.) that all have small risks of catastrophic events. In most cases, the risks of more invasive testing outweigh the risks of just not pursuing any further workup.

Nothing in medicine comes for free—everything is a tradeoff.

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> Isn't it possible you could be early-detecting something serious that is much easier to treat now vs when symptoms appear?

It could be. It could also be the cade that you undergo invasive surgery for something that would have never caused you problems within your life. The problem is that cancer isn‘t cancer. Even if it originates from the same tissue, some tumors behave very different from others.

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>"More men die with prostate cancer than because of it" - an old adage that still holds true in the 21st century

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33360667/

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Yeah a 2% risk of having something which can easily kill you and is very expensive to treat, especially if you're not elderly and still have lots of life ahead of your, is not exactly trivial. I would want to know about this
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