Health
Pandemic raises difficult issues about limits of tests for covid-19, other diseases – Washington Post
Test results may be false positives or negatives, or may show an abnormality that doesn’t matter. Even accurate, meaningful outcomes are useless unless acted on…
For many Americans, including physicians like Chu, who specializes in primary care and infectious disease at Massachusetts General Hospital, the pandemic has forced difficult conversations about the limits of medical tests. It has also revealed the catastrophic harms of failing to recognize those limits.
People think a positive test equals disease and a negative test equals not disease, said Deborah Korenstein, who heads the general medicine division at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in…
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