That may or may not be informed by additional information, for instance a person close to me may have had an early death from colon cancer and therefore I value the relief of having done the screening higher than someone else.
What makes you think that personal preferences can't be studied? I'll tell you they can be studied because they are being studied.
There is no "recommendation system" that can predict the right course of action based on my personal preference. There isn't even a good system to record and measure personal preference, because expression of perception is by itself highly subjective.
A doctor might ask you "how bad is the pain on a scale of one to ten?" or something of those sorts. That is informed by your entire history of pain experience. You're likely to rate the worst pain you ever felt as 10 - every time.
Then, pain does not equal suffering. A child might start crying and get upset about a finger prick. A trained martial artist might be able to emotionally ignore the sensation of most pain stimuli, even though it's felt just as strongly.
Could a system measuring and accounting for all this exist in principle? Perhaps. It doesn't exist though, so your point is moot.
Okay, referencing studies showing that people don't accurately report pain in pain assessments is the second time you've obliquely referenced well-known groups of studies (the first time being a roundabout reference to How Doctors Die[1]).
Think about how bad this logic is: you're referencing papers which gather objective evidence on personal perceptions around treatment, and using those papers as evidence that it's impossible to gather objective evidence on personal perceptions. Do you not see how the very evidence you're referencing refutes your point?
One fix being studied for pain assessments is to additionally add a question about what the worst pain the patient has ever suffered previously is, and compare that to their rating of the current pain.
So you have a statistic that says doctors choose to die differently than the patients they are treating. That is interesting, but merely descriptive, not prescriptive. It does not tell you which treatments works best for someone who happens to be a doctor.
If you are talking about fixes being studied for problems borne out of subjectivity, you admit that objectivity is at odds with the individual.
I really don't even know what we're talking about any more. What are "problems borne out of subjectivity"?
There is no pain meter that gives an objective reading of the patients experience and outlook and then tells you if some medication is statistically justified, relative to the harm it causes.
Yes, pain and suffering are subjective experiences, but they are also objective phenomena. We know, to some extent, how pain works, and can see it happening on brain scans.
I think the core of our disagreement here is that you seem to think that experience is somehow supernatural and therefore can't be studied, but it isn't: experience happens in the physical world, via physical and chemical processes, and can absolutely be studied via normal scientific means.
A lot of the things that indeed are possible (like brain imaging for pain response) are only feasible in a lab setting, they're not in widespread clinical use. Maybe they should be, maybe doctors shouldn't be handing out fentanyl like candy and instead look at what's going on in their patient's brain first - but then how do you prove that what's showing on the screen reflects the experience of the patient?
That's not to say that such studies are entirely useless. They're one more data point, but ultimately, the decision should be up to the individual. This is also closer to my experience of how patients are actually treated. There is no oracle system that can tell you what the right way to treat an individual is.
> I think the core of our disagreement here is that you seem to think that experience is somehow supernatural
Not at all. I don't think we disagree on what's possible "in theory". I'm not a dualist.
It sounds like you're imagining that looking at your individual case will necessarily break you out of the broader statistical pattern because you have special information, and you should act on that without regard for the broader pattern.
This is an error because it's not the case that your individual info. will lead you to be able to escape the false positive rates.
TL;DR: If you buck the rule and get screened earlier than recommended, you may end up diagnosing something earlier, but you also may end up hitting the false positive treatment which has its own consequences. The general rates capture these individual possibilities.