Aaron Hartman, MD, presents a short YouTube commentary arguing that current liquid biopsy cancer-screening tests are not ready for routine use. He states these tests have a 58% false-positive rate and miss 70% of cancers, leading to unnecessary invasive follow-ups and missed diagnoses, and cites Marty Makary's book 'Blind Spots' as a source for broader critiques of medical practices.
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This screening for cancer actually may hurt you. What am I talking about? Doing liquid biopsies has become very popular in the last year or two, especially in the integrative world. We all want to find and diagnose cancer early. The problem with liquid biopsies is that they have false positives 58% of the time, which means if it's positive 58% of the time, the majority of time it's not a true positive. One of the results of this, it results in biopsies, procedures, things that actually do carry some harm and aren't needed. That's the first thing about these liquid biopsies. The second thing about them is they miss 70% of all cancers. So just think about it. A screening test that misses 70% of all cancers. So if you do it and it's positive, you have a 58% chance that you don't. That's false positive. And if you have cancer, there's a 70% chance of missing it. Not the best screening tool. Now, I know everybody wants to find out. Amazing screening tool, that's easy. Blood draw, doesn't hurt, doesn't harm. This test has lots of promise. It's still not ready for prime time. You know, some patients will ask me about this, in particular, what I'm referring to as the gallery. But there's other, other versions of this liquid screening. Now, where did I learn about this? There's a book by Marty Makary called Blind Spots, and he takes a deep dive into some of the things that are questionable. Things like bioidentical hormones, things like these screening screen cancer things. Things like other screen things and things we do in the healthcare system, like hand washing. Did you know hand washing was controversial, you know, in the 1820s? It takes a deep dive to question our system. What are we doing? What are we missing? Right. What are our blind spots? One thing I want to talk about is just the liquid biopsy thing, especially because it's very popular right now in certain circles. It's not ready for primetime. If you have questions about it, we'll put some links below to the book so you take a deeper dive. And what are the blind spots in our healthcare system that we're missing that everybody needs to know about?
