Sure it does. The death or major illness of a sitting president is impactful in a way that the death of an average retiree is not. The cost of performing the test is inconvenience (admittedly of a man whose time is very valuable), but the cost of missing a major health problem has geopolitical consequences. The health recommendations are definitely going to shift toward "better safe than sorry."
> Sure it does. The death or major illness of a sitting president is impactful in a way that the death of an average retiree is not.
The recommendation is not based around the public impact of the patient's death, but around the expected utility of the test in improving the length and/or quality of the patient's life, which is fairly low in the best of times for PSA screening.
A president and their team is absolutely going to take a "better safe than sorry" approach. The doctor is not the only person who decides what treatment should be, the patient does too.
PSA is not fool proof test, and is susceptible to false positives. A substantial fraction of men, in the 40+% range have prostate cancer at death. The treatments for it can be painful and have long recoveries, so there's not obvious solutions.
> Second, many recommendations are based on resource limitations that simply don't exist for a POTUS.
AFAIK, the PSA one isn't based on resource limitations, though.
It's based on the specificity being low enough and the risks, especially with advancing age, of the follow up tests being high enough that at a certain point the test is perceived as having zero-to-negative value in terms of QALY for the patient.
