This YouTube video explores the fight against cancer, highlighting the significant advancements in treatment while arguing that early detection is the most effective, yet underutilized, method for saving lives. The video emphasizes the importance of proactive screenings, despite potential biases and cost concerns, and advocates for a healthcare system that prioritizes preventative care. This segment powerfully demonstrates the correlation between early cancer detection and significantly higher survival rates. The presenter uses compelling statistics to illustrate the dramatic difference in outcomes between early-stage and advanced-stage cancers, emphasizing the critical role of early detection in improving survival chances. yeah. Greg has leukemia. "and my doctor says, yourPSA is fine, and your cholesterol is fine, but by the way you have leukemia. now, even I know that's not how you use "by the way." it's more like, by the way there's something on your lip. not by the way you have a deadly form of cancer." if you ever get asimilar call, you should know that there are fourbig ways we fight cancer today: cut, poison, burn, melt. in lots of cancers, when those uncontrolled cells start to divide, they glom together, creating a tumor. this is localized or early stage cancer. and if we catch it here, we cut it out. "if you can see the cancer and it's early that's alwayswhat they do. boom. we'll just cut it out beforeit spreads." but with some cancers, like Greg's, you can't do that. and with others it gets too late. cancers can spread into nearby tissue and then later into other parts of the body. these are regional and then later distant or metastatic cancers. once cancer has spread, the question that doctors have to deal with is: how do you tell what's you and what's cancer? so what's "poison"? you know that one: that's chemotherapy. "I get in achair, nurse comes in, puts on a hazmat suit. and whole time. worse -it's themonster that was inside our bodies the whole time. here's the stat that really got me: half of all men and a third of all women in the US will be diagnosed with some form of cancer in their lives. around the world, out of every six people who die, one of them dies of cancer. I don't say that to scare you. I say it because if you think this topic doesn't apply to you -specifically you-you're wrong. and me. there's an uncomfortably high chance that at some point in my life I might get that call from a doctor. people I love already have... so the question is: what can we do about it? over the past couple months, I've gotten obsessed with this topic. I've spoken to doctors and patients. I talked to the head of the biden cancer moonshot. I got my brain scanned. I'm going to show you how we fight cancer, because it is amazing. but I also found something else. in this video, I want to make the case that though we have made enormous leaps with new cancer treatments, we have also largely ignored the single best way to save the mostlives. "are we winning the war on cancer?" "war on cancer -" "the emperor of all maladies -" "a civil war in the body -" "we've made tremendous one thing, detecting someone early might mean that they live longer after their diagnosis but not that they live longer total. imagine detecting someone at 60 versus 67 and they both die at 70. this is lead time bias. or you might catch a lot more cases that are mild, so it might look like your survival rate went up but actually nothing changed. this is overdiagnosis bias. these are good reasons to treat the data with healthy skepticism. early detection isn't good by itself. it's good if it actually leads to better outcomes for patients. and there's another conversation about costs. how do we make these tests cheaper? how do we make them more accessible? how do we make sure thatpeople don't go into medical bankruptcy? but if youhear people say that more information is worse for the individual somehow. that it's scary or that it might cause harmful follow-ups... I don't get stopping there. like, first of all, keeping information from people is paternalistic. but more importantly it's on us to develop a health care system that incentivizes proactive care and doesn't incentivize harmful follow-ups. not to say, "oh we can't get more information because we might act poorly on it." like, what?? and don't get me started on the messed up incentives here. I'lllet greg handle this one: "so why don't we go outand be more like a compass needle... so I was inside a bigmagnet which was moving and making those sounds dingdingdingwahwaah-[I'm sorry ok] which was then causing my little water compass needles to go [what] and emit a radio signal that was detected and madethe image. that is the signal, this radio signal that our bodies are emitting that we then detect. how do we detect it? with a radio antenna. so we cansee our smushy insides and detect possible tumorsand that's just one tool! there's so many options now for how we can better see ourselves. I started to imagine a world where getting cancer screenings was like getting an annual dental checkup or something. you catch them early and you cut them out and you save lives. but it'snot that simple... the huge breakthrough and it's happening every year in all kinds of different cancers. but here's I know it's better to catch cancer early. but how much better? how does it compare to a new treatment or something? in the course of making this episode, I got invited to get a free screening for several different kinds of cancer all at once. there are lots of ways to detect different kinds of cancer but the one that I'm gonna get is a full body MRI. by the way what I'm doing is controversial. I'm getting screened for cancers with no symptoms and without a specific higher risk that I know about. many doctors would tell me this is a waste of my time or worse it could give me unnecessary or even damaging care... I'll come back to that. I can't take my camera in with me but I'm going in there alright here we go! I'm all done... I've never gotten an mri before. it was really interesting. it sounds a little bit like this booom bungbong dingdingging "please hold your