Wrote Hacking Healthcare, managed hospital systems, blah, blah... I remember first learning about cancer treatment and encology in detail when we took over management of a health system with a large set of encology centers. It was very eye opening to understand that one word, "cancer", is really an inappropriate blanket term for hundreds of more or less distinct diseases. Yes, they share a base element of disease mechanism but in terms of diagnosis, prognosis, treatment and morbidity, they are wildly different.

I think the HN crowd may be interested in learning more about TNM staging (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TNM_staging_system) and the staging process in detail (https://www.facs.org/media/j30havyf/ajcc_7thed_cancer_stagin... pg 457 for prostate) . This was once "open source" but is now locked behind a proprietary API of sorts (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1sa2Qlv03-E-nBJuUynZuFxIaMsO...)

These are US oriented resource links.

Regarding the posted article, there are two big related factors that the average patient has a difficult time appreciating. First is that "doing nothing and or waiting & seeing", even in 2024, is still the best course of treatment for a huge array of situations. The second related factor, is that the rate of preventable medical errors is absolutely staggering. In my multi-decade experience it typically hovers over 20%. As a patient myself I have been the victim of three near fatal preventable medical errors. So 1/5 of the time doctors are creating new problems and complications that are preventable if all of the known best practices at the time are employed, while attempting to resolve whatever is wrong with you. A troubling amount of the time the treatment can be worse than the disease.