Agreed. I think his blog title, "Probably Overthinking It", is appropriate named.

Essentially every assertion in the article is either an oversimification, cherry picking a random niche situation to highlight, or just flat out factually inaccurate.

Let's take this paragraph for example:

"Catching cancer early is beneficial only if (1) the cancers we catch would otherwise cause disease and death, and (2) we have treatments that prevent those outcomes, and (3) these benefits outweigh the costs of additional screening. This table does not show that any of those things is true."

To address these one by one:

1. Obviously cancer causes disease and death. The same graphic he references makes that abundantly clear. Sure, there might be some rare exceptions (elderly patients with slow growing colon cancer for example), but we're talking about the general population.

2. All cancers have treatment options available in some form (could be chemo, radiation, surgical resection, etc), so this assumption doesn't even make sense to include. Let's assume for a second though that treatments might not be available. Even if that were true, there ARE treatments that can help treat cancer symptoms, and but may not affect the tumor directly. Often these are specific to the specific type of cancer.

3. This assertion is dumb - is the author really trying to argue that providing symptomatic or other relief to a cancer patient isn't a sufficient benefit to warrant additional screening?

I could go on, but you get the point. Some people just like arguing for the sake of arguing I guess.