Here is an idea about ethics in medicine that has been lurking in my mind for years.

Here is an idea about ethics in medicine that has been lurking in my mind for years.

An intervention that reduce the lifetime risk of a given disease from 1% to .5% will benefit only to less than 1% of people, but the benefits for the society is large because it halves the number of diseased people, so halving the costs of their care, maintaining productivity, etc.

So some policies presented as beneficial for individuals are in fact only marginally beneficial for them (an expected value does make sense only if you repeat an experiment a large number of times; individuals live only once), while there are largely beneficial for society (the experiment is repeated).

I'm pretty sure that this question have been discussed by ethicists. Does that ring a bell for anyone? I'd be pleased if you can direct me to some literature.

Also, if you an ethicist and have a few minutes to spare I'd like to have your opinion on a related question...

#ethics #medicine #publicHealth #academicChatter

@HydrePrever but what are the risk caries by the intervention ? And the false positive rate, etc
I remember a study about breast cancer screening showing that screening too much will increase the rate of unnecessary treatments (mostly false positives if I remember). So there is a balance to find like more targeted screening for at-risk persons instead of every women above a certain age

@SadKitten well that's the point. Public health policies aim to reduce the number of diseased individuals / the total cost of disease, treatment, prevention, etc (and of course false positive have a cost). If some targeted screening is put in place, it will be in this aim... (there's an ongoing evaluation of targeted screening)

@HydrePrever its also a touchy subject in fat people because we are often accused of bad health, costing too much, laziness, lack of will, etc. But the structural causes and the research are never addressed in the media or the policies. Adding Manger-bouger in all food-related ads won’t change anything

@SadKitten oh yes, many health issues are induced by our productivist society (sedentary lifestyle, fixed working hours, obesogenic food...). And the pharmaceutic industry is very happy to sell you, say, benzodiazepines (totally random example), while halving one's work burden and touching grass more often would be the first thing to do in many cases...