Especially if you have good insurance, you'll get to experience getting passed around from specialist to specialist who will take great joy in milking you and your insurance company for unnecessary and pointless tests.
Doing tests is not only economically costly, its also costly in terms of health, so ordering unnecessary tests is in detriment to health. There are also false positives. So tests without symptoms should not be performed. But that also means you dont find things pre-emptively.
For example, you are worried that your fatigue is due to a brain tumor (google surely told you that), so you ask your doctor to do an MRI to rule it out. MRI comes in negative. But the MRI radiation gave you cancer, because it does (in a very small amount of people), as well as gave you very expensive bill for it, because MRI are expensive everywhere, not only in the US.
Good example, except you're thinking of a CT scan, not MRI. CT scan uses x-rays. MRI uses no ionizing radiation.
I ended up seeing a 'naturopath' and asked for the test and I have both alpha thalassemia minor and beta thalassemia minor, which explains all my symptoms.
As another anecdote, I went to a physical exam with no complaints. The doctor palpated my testicles and said I was fine. About 10 hours later, I get a call saying I have testicular cancer and need an ultrasound, which I did the next day. My testicles are fine; to this day, I have no idea why I was sent for this test.
That's not entirely true. It's accepted you get periodic screening for many issues. (breast cancer, pap smear are probably the most common) Then there are tests you can easily request without any symptoms. (STI and allergy tests for example)
> But the MRI radiation gave you cancer
There's no MRI radiation. That's not how it works.
I mixed up CT Scan with MRI, corrected in another comment.
Is that really the best lesson here? Tests have known false positive and false negative ratios. That's why for some things you get immediately retested if the first result is positive. People cannot know/remember everything, so there will be always done room for error. But if you want to get better, you've really got only the choice to trust a doctor, or learn enough medicine to help yourself (still can't get access to drugs this way).
I hope nobody skips a trip to the doctor just because they think it may fail.
The latter method also sucks when surgical intervention is necessary.