You could repeat the test, perhaps on a more frequent interval to keep an eye on it. You could follow up with a more specific test, or do confirming blood work. In the meantime you can adjust your diet as a precaution, or get motivated to get in shape just in case.
There's plenty of room between "go under the knife" and "ignore altogether."
Or only consider it a positive once the confidence is high enough that false positives are not a problem anymore.
Getting a test good enough to still make it useful (detect enough of the true positives) would of course be a challenge, but the more data is available, the more feasible that might be.
P.S. The responses ignore what I actually responded to, which was a claim that "The false positive thing is a nonissue" -- where the "thing" is 99% false positives. The only way to respond to information such that "the false positive thing" becomes "a nonissue" is to never respond to it at all. The responses to my comment all address some strawman.
You could repeat the test, perhaps on a more frequent interval to keep an eye on it. You could follow up with a more specific test, or do confirming blood work. In the meantime you can adjust your diet as a precaution, or get motivated to get in shape just in case.
There's plenty of room between "go under the knife" and "ignore altogether."
Or only consider it a positive once the confidence is high enough that false positives are not a problem anymore.
Getting a test good enough to still make it useful (detect enough of the true positives) would of course be a challenge, but the more data is available, the more feasible that might be.
There is a lot of space between ignoring and doing invasive dangerous operation after some blot was spotted on some imaging diagnosis.
In which case, why bother getting the information in the first place?
P.S. The responses ignore what I actually responded to, which was a claim that "The false positive thing is a nonissue" -- where the "thing" is 99% false positives. The only way to respond to information such that "the false positive thing" becomes "a nonissue" is to never respond to it at all. The responses to my comment all address some strawman.
yeah? give adequate accurate information to people and let them decide what to do with the information.
if someone told you, you had a .01% chance of getting a disease for example, aren't you better off with that information? even if it is noisy?