I'm not quite sure how to respond to this because it just seems like a ridiculous statement to me. Of course I tell patients things in a way to reduce their anxiety. It often doesn't help. Your last sentence is just plain wrong. Checkups don't keep you healthy. Good diet and exercise does.
If you tell someone "you have cancer but it's growth rate isn't fast enough yet for it to be worth treating" that will have a very different impact than "you're fine but we need to keep an eye on you to make sure you're in optimal health". But really they describe the same state of the world.
The alternative being proposed is to lump the people who are fine in with the people who are going to die unless they get treatment urgently and effectively forget or destroy knowledge about their state so that the amount of anxiety avoided in the first group exceeds the amount of horrible death and pain in the second.
It seems pretty clear that we have a ... problem ..(?) somewhere if we're even considering this.
I'm going to guess that the problem is that we can't deal with hazardous information very well. The knowledge that a person has a specific not-worth-treating cancer somewhere is hazardous to them and they need to be insulted from it. But it is not hazardous to the medical system, rather it is useful since with further monitoring it can turn into something actionable (a successful cancer treatment instead of patient death). But people are expected to be managers of their health (which makes sense), so that means they kind of have to know this hazardous information.
Some people are anxious types. Few people can comprehend medical statistics. Even an intelligent person such as yourself doesn't seem to comprehend the danger that can come from a "check up".
After you've diagnosed thousands of patients and discovered hundreds of incidentalomas, perhaps then you can tell me how simple this is.
What I am saying is that things need to change, not that this is a trivially fixable problem. Exactly how you would change things is not obvious to me, but I would say that not doing tests because of the information hazard issue is a symptom that something is wrong.
Perhaps the more general version of this problem is "don't set up systems that give billions of people nonconstructive negative feedback". It's applicable beyond medicine, I would point at unrealistic celebrity beauty ideals as another manifestation.
I agree with that. Unfortunately, what is wrong is probably something to do with human nature, and a system might not be able to fix that.
haha maybe. But there is usually a trend towards things having interfaces that are more human-friendly, so maybe one day healthcare will adapt.