The definition of disease is presence of symptoms. You cannot treat symptoms that do not exist. Medieval approach is to treatment based on assumptions, often fatal.

As for screening: the question is how many people do you have to screen to save one life and at what cost? Could the money spent on screening thousands to save just one life, be better spent treating evident disease in others and saving more lives? And what cost in money and to those who are false positive, and in the case of breast screening, have radical surgery where none is needed?

And how about this: more men die with prostate cancer than from it because it is slow to develop and metastasise, and since prostate cancer us an old man’s disease, they usually die of some other non-related disease first. What value screening?

Humans are not evolved to live much past reproductive age. Most diseases are diseases of old age - diabetes, cancers, dementia, cardiovascular diseases, for example.

The problem for heath care is this.

You cannot stop old age and the diseases that come with it. When I was growing up, people just died from most of the diseases people now survive because of medical intervention.

If Jones is saved from disease X, she lives to get disease Y, and if she survives that she gets disease Y at which point along comes ‘flu, gastroenteritis, bacterial infection or CoVid to finish her off. And whilst Jones is being treated for X, Y, Z and finally languishing for weeks/months on a ward, much younger Smith cannot get his treatment for a less complex disease on time because resources are finite.

Too few people understand that and it’s about time they did.

‘… due to an overwhelmed and chronically understaffed NHS.‘

Because of what I said above, that is only ever going to get worse as advances in medical intervention take place. Certainly with a State health system it is impossible on the grounds of cost to have sufficient built in redundancy to serve all comers on demand. All resources are scarce and have to be rationed somehow, either by price or quotas or waiting. Time people in the UK understood that too.