Not disagreeing about your post at all, which sounds entirely reasonable to me (I'm not a doctor), but I think this is worth emphasising:
> Most tests do have some degree of false positives,
I think many people don't appreciate the danger of false positives.
The complications that can come from unnecessary treatments, the dangers that more invasive tests might cause, the aggregate effect of all the time and expense the extra testing causes (e.g. by putting a strain on hospitals who may need that MRI for someone else), the negative emotional consequences of the stress from the false diagnosis, the possible financial implications etc. Even a very small chance of a false positive can have huge consequences if the test is deployed widely enough.
>"I think many people don't appreciate the danger of false positives."
Yes, but to most people, we compare that danger with the danger of a positive test that never gets done. More information is never a bad thing. And I'm reasonably sure that for almost every test that can have a dangerous false-positive, there is also a corresponding test that can corroborate those results, if not detect the false-positive.
> Most tests do have some degree of false positives,
I think many people don't appreciate the danger of false positives.
The complications that can come from unnecessary treatments, the dangers that more invasive tests might cause, the aggregate effect of all the time and expense the extra testing causes (e.g. by putting a strain on hospitals who may need that MRI for someone else), the negative emotional consequences of the stress from the false diagnosis, the possible financial implications etc. Even a very small chance of a false positive can have huge consequences if the test is deployed widely enough.