Its pretty baffling to me why we don't do ultrasounds a lot more than we currently do them. Recently went down the rabbit hole of childhood cancers and there are so many that can be detected and treated earlier if ultrasounds were a standard practice at every check up.
The rationale for not doing it seems to be just cost , and its likely you dont have cancer. But if you do , I would sure like to know early!
There are a lot of things you can see that will take you down a rabbit hole of further investigations and turn out to be nothing.
We perform fetal ultrasonography which excludes most of the relevant deadly cardiac conditions.
It is well established in medicine that improved/early detection does not equal improved patient outcomes and can actually result in patient harm.
Is there a specific time of detection that is well established as improving patient outcomes?
So testing more can actually result in worse health outcomes than limited testing.
Because just like undertesting kills people, overtesting kills people.
And because medical dollars are limited, and even in a perfect world, they should be spent towards the highest ROI.
Also, as mentioned above, the ROI of overtesting can well be negative.
Probably the societal ROI is better for spending more of its healthcare money on something else anyway.
More relevantly, people who are paying for their own care can choose how to address any issues discovered by testing. If you're on a trip deciding where to go and someone tells you not to look at part of the map because it is a dangerous area, does it make sense to blindly believe them or to look at it, do further investigation and then decide whether to travel there?