Opinion: Listen: When do tests hurt more than help?
When is a diagnostic test for a rare disease worth taking?
Manil Suri and Daniel Morgan are an unusual team: Manil is a mathematics professor and author (of both fiction and nonfiction), while Daniel is a physician and professor of epidemiology, public health, and infectious diseases. But — in what they say is a typical “Smalltimore” moment — both a neighbor and a student had told them they should work together because of a shared interest in false positives on diagnostics tests. The result was a recent First Opinion essay, “Diagnostic tests for rare conditions present a mathematical conundrum,” in which they write about how the more rare a disease ease, the more likely a test will return a false positive.
On this episode of the “First Opinion Podcast,” I spoke with Manil and Daniel about how false positives can cause major problems, how both physicians and patients misunderstand statistics, and how their work plays out in their own lives.
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