It would be one thing if you were to have done that math to show "the risk of colon cancer is so high that this decision is worth it"--and to be clear: maybe it is!--but the idea that you simply don't find a 1% chance of a complication to be a big deal as the absolute number looks small to you (as opposed to making some relative comparison to the rate of preventable cancer) horrifies me... and, for your sake, I hope you aren't that careless continually with all of the other decisions you make in your life (any number of which might also have a 1% chance of going badly for you). 1 in 500 is absolutely a very very large number.

You have roughly a 4% chance of developing colorectal cancer in your lifetime: https://www.cancer.org/cancer/colon-rectal-cancer/about/key-...

Amazingly, the American Cancer Society had already done that calculation when they made their recommendation to get scoped once every 10 years.

... which might lead one to ask "do you worry about the risk of complications?" when hearing about someone who gets the scope 10x as often as recommended. The answer may be "well, even if the risk of complications is 10x, my risk of getting a disease the scope will catch still far outweighs it, so it's worth it. Or it may be "yeah, that is a concern, but it's mitigated somewhat by xyz factor." And both of those are interesting answers. Why the hostility to this conversation?

That is very high if you get one every year.

So, don't do that, unless you have enough risk factors to justify it. Get it done once every 10 years as per the recommendation.

You realize the context of my question was that I was responding to someone who actually does get one done every year, right? And that I acknowledged that the risk-reward calculation changes quite a bit depending on what risk factors you have? I don't know what point you're trying to make, unless you think I'm just wrong to be asking this person in a special circumstance how he thinks about the risk. For example, perhaps there are extra precautions that I don't know about that can be taken for someone for whom yearly scopes are important.