I want to share a very personal story that connects to what I think might be one of the most important medical conundrums of our lifetime.

Detection technology is outrunning cures. More ppl are living with a medical omen of ~what might kill them in the future~ without the ability to truly know or to fix it.

This story is really personal. My parents both died of cancers that were untreatable by the time they were discovered. Both died within two years of the cancer diagnosis.

By my mid-30s, I decided that I wanted to make early detection a pillar of my health plan, next to diet and exercise. I got a Prenuvo full-body MRI and went over the results with a counselor. I planned to get more preventive MRI scans every two years.

But around the time I was researching the merits of Prenuvo, I came across the story of Korea’s thyroid cancer campaign. In the early 2000s, Korea encouraged mass ultrasound screenings for its citizens, leading to a 15x increase in the national thyroid-cancer rate. But it was soon clear that the tests were just highlighting subclinical disease. So the government ordered many of the machines to be taken away. Thyroid-cancer incidence plunged, and, again, the mortality rate didn’t change. Thousands of people thought they had cancer that they didn’t actually have. Some may have received harmful treatments they didn’t need.

I haven’t decided what to do about my own full-body MRI screenings. But there are millions of people like me who, in the age of detection, face an existential question, whether or not they recognize it:

When our ability to detect biological abnormality outruns our ability to understand and to treat it, how much detection is too much?