> a surprisingly large portion of the population likely has thyroid cancer and doesn't know it, and many have it and it isn't treated
A larger portion of the population has prostate cancer. You probably have it right now.
My mom likes to tell a story from one of her classes at medical school. The teacher had a bunch of slides of prostate material; you had to identify which prostate was cancerous. There were so many questions ("this one looks cancerous. Is this it?") from the class that he was forced to announce "look, there's a bit of cancer in everyone's prostate. Find the one with an obvious problem".
It's slow, but it will get you if nothing else does first. :/
> Uh, why didn't she teach the known diagnostic criteria?
Generally you would do this before having the lab in which students are expected to use the knowledge. It's kind of pointless the other way around. In other words, that doesn't help with the problem. Knowing the official diagnostic criteria is often not helpful for diagnosing a condition.
Your oncologist will be winging it based on their past experience.
> Prostate cancers are graded according to the Gleason system. This system assigns a Gleason grade based on how much the cancer looks like normal prostate tissue.
> If the cancer looks a lot like normal prostate tissue, a grade of 1 is assigned.
> If the cancer looks very abnormal, it is given a grade of 5.
> Grades 2 through 4 have features in between these extremes.
> Most cancers are grade 3 or higher, and grades 1 and 2 are not often used.
> The Gleason score can be between 2 and 10, but most are at least a 6. The higher the Gleason score, the more likely it is that the cancer will grow and spread quickly.
> Since prostate cancers often have areas with different grades, a grade is assigned to the 2 areas that make up most of the cancer. These 2 grades are added to yield the Gleason score (also called the Gleason sum).
Note that this explicitly contemplates, at the low end of the scale, that it's difficult to distinguish between normal prostate cells and cancerous prostate cells.
Grades 1 and 2 are not often used because biopsies, a fairly invasive process, tend to be taken from men who are already suspected to have higher-than-average levels of cancer. If we took biopsies from a representative population sample, grades 1 and 2 would feature prominently in the results. That is the point of the med school anecdote -- even in samples artifically chosen to highlight the difference between a normal prostate gland and one with a serious problem, you just can't keep low-grade cancers out of the "normal" samples.
The point of the lab exercise is to give students practice grading cancers, and recognizing the difference between serious prostate cancer and run-of-the-mill prostate cancer. Only experience will help with this, because the diagnostic criteria are "prostate cancer runs the full continuum".
It is the norm in medicine that a question of the form "does this patient have this condition" has no truly objective answer. Surgery is well understood; internal medicine is not.
A larger portion of the population has prostate cancer. You probably have it right now.
My mom likes to tell a story from one of her classes at medical school. The teacher had a bunch of slides of prostate material; you had to identify which prostate was cancerous. There were so many questions ("this one looks cancerous. Is this it?") from the class that he was forced to announce "look, there's a bit of cancer in everyone's prostate. Find the one with an obvious problem".
It's slow, but it will get you if nothing else does first. :/