Click here: to donate by Credit Card
Or here: to donate by PayPal
Or by mail to: Free Republic, LLC - PO Box 9771 - Fresno, CA 93794
Thank you very much and God bless you.
Posted on 10/26/2025 9:06:59 AM PDT by Red Badger
It’s not just women that Cartel Medicine feeds on, although it does prefer them.
Men are also meat for the grinder, especially when their privates are involved.
The screening hoax we witnessed with mammograms has a counterpart with prostates and the PSA test.
The predation here is especially synergistic as the maiming and destruction caused by prostate interventions feed two sub-Cartels: those of erectile dysfunction and incontinence. The adult diaper business is thriving because of this butchery.
Urologists, not wanting to be left behind by pediatricians, psychiatrists, cardiologists, dermatologists and dentists have their own cozy racket.
With thanks to Richard Ablin and Ronald Piana for telling the truth.
Let’s start with an analogy.
Analogy Imagine you're the owner of a large orchard filled with thousands of apple trees. You know that some of these trees might have a disease that could potentially kill them, but it's rare - only about 3% of your trees will actually die from this disease. The rest will live out their natural lives, disease or not.
Now, a salesman comes to you with a new "revolutionary" test that he claims can detect this disease early. He suggests testing all your trees regularly. It sounds great at first, but there's a catch:
The test often can't tell the difference between healthy trees, trees with harmless spots, and trees with the actual deadly disease. In fact, it's wrong about 80% of the time. When the test says there's a problem, you're forced to cut off large branches from the tree to check if the disease is really there.
For every 1,000 trees you test, you might save one tree from dying of the disease. But in the process, you'll unnecessarily damage hundreds of healthy trees. Many of these trees will never produce apples again, some will be permanently stunted, and a few might even die from the damage caused by your well-intentioned but overzealous pruning.
What's worse, the salesman and the pruning company are making a fortune from all this testing and pruning, which costs you millions every year. They're so invested in this process that they resist any suggestion to change it, even when other orchard experts start to question its value.
This is essentially what's happened with PSA screening for prostate cancer. The test, like our hypothetical orchard test, is often inaccurate. It has led to millions of men undergoing unnecessary biopsies and treatments, which frequently result in life-altering side effects. All of this for a disease that, in most cases, would never have caused them harm. Meanwhile, the medical industry has profited enormously from this process, creating a powerful incentive to maintain the status quo despite mounting evidence of its flaws.
The book's main message is a call to recognize this situation for what it is - a public health disaster driven more by profit than by sound medical science - and to advocate for a more measured, evidence-based approach to prostate cancer detection and treatment.
12-point summary
Here's a 12-point summary of the book, including key data and statistics for those that don’t want to read the longer Q&A below.
1. PSA (Prostate-Specific Antigen) is not cancer-specific. It's present in normal, benign, and cancerous prostate tissue. There is no specific PSA level that definitively indicates cancer.
2. Routine PSA screening leads to significant overdiagnosis and overtreatment. For every 1,000 men screened, only 1 man may avoid death from prostate cancer, while many others suffer unnecessary biopsies and treatments.
3. Prostate cancer is age-related. About 40% of men aged 40-49, 70% of men 60-69, and 80% of men over 70 have prostate cancer. Most of these cancers are slow-growing and unlikely to cause death.
4. The lifetime risk of dying from prostate cancer is only 3%, meaning 97% of men will die from other causes, even if they have prostate cancer.
5. Radical prostatectomy, a common treatment resulting from PSA screening, often leads to significant side effects. Up to 60-80% of men experience erectile dysfunction and 10-20% have long-term urinary incontinence.
6. PSA screening has not significantly reduced prostate cancer mortality. Studies show similar death rates between screened and unscreened populations.
7. The PSA test has a high false-positive rate of up to 80%, leading to many unnecessary biopsies and treatments.
8. Active surveillance is increasingly recognized as an appropriate option for many men with low-risk prostate cancer, potentially avoiding unnecessary treatments and their side effects.
9. The U.S. healthcare system spends an estimated $3 billion annually on PSA tests alone, with billions more on subsequent procedures and treatments.
10. New technologies like robotic surgery and proton beam therapy, while heavily marketed, have not shown superior outcomes to traditional treatments but are significantly more expensive.
11. Conflicts of interest are prevalent in prostate cancer care. Many researchers and physicians promoting PSA screening have financial ties to companies that profit from increased screening and treatment.
12. The FDA approved the PSA test for screening in 1994 despite significant reservations from its own advisory panel. This decision, along with aggressive marketing by medical companies, led to widespread adoption of PSA screening before its benefits and harms were fully understood.
|
|
Click here: to donate by Credit Card Or here: to donate by PayPal Or by mail to: Free Republic, LLC - PO Box 9771 - Fresno, CA 93794 Thank you very much and God bless you. |
It's the only way to be sure -- read the disclaimers in the small print, optional.
Tests! And of course, get insurance and government to pay for them. And pay, And pay/ And pay.
After this, and the other related article posted today, I am seething. 😡 I insist that this era in medicine will go down as the most barbaric in history.
Every year, in addition to the PSA test, I get the vinyl glove exam. Very unpleasant experience but gives additional assurance all is okay with the prostate.
My friend is 90 and he was just diagnosed with prostate cancer. The Dr. wanted to start treatment immediately. He laughed and politely declined.
The old “DIGITAL’ Exam...............
“For every 1,000 men screened, only 1 man may avoid death from prostate cancer, “
For every 10,000,000 screened, 10,000 lives are saved?
Sounds to me like you enjoy it
Is the finger supposed to go in and out several times like with my doctor?
I insist that this era in medicine will go down as the most barbaric in history.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
That comment is right on target and I’m always telling my family members that they need to do their own medical research in detail BEFORE visiting any family doctor for anything. There has been numerous postings here over the years about prostate health and PSA testing and several times I’ve posted reminders of what Dr. Thomas Stamey said.... for the record, the initial use of the PSA testing as a tool for determining prostate cancer is based on Dr. Stamey’s research but a number of years later and with the benefit of more research, he had a totally different opinion that was quite different than his original study conclusions.... https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2004/stanford-researcher-declares-psa-era-is-over-in-predicting-prostate-cancer-risk.html
Moon river.
you love it
A good analogy for this is auto accessories. They develop and market them and suddenly everyone needs the item. Of course it may end up killing you do to power, speed, loss of control.
Person psa experience: did blood test, doc said psa was elevated, could be a false reading, could mean I had sex the morning of the blood test(very likely).
Second blood test: all good, normal numbers.
The new doc explains prostate cancer this way, most men will die WITH prostate cancer, not from prostate cancer.
And your age correlates with the percentage of.
That was stated in this article: 40-49=-9 40% chance, etc.
I’ve been saying this for years.
I’m astonished that I’m reading it somewhere finally.
I would argue that the same applies to colonoscopy.
But the article ignores the basic personal responsibility of the patient to avoid ‘cartel medicine’ entirely. My father became suddenly became bedridden this past week - NOT due to injury, disease or procedure - and it is entirely the result of his own actions & inaction alike (though the cartel left a paper trail of enabling).
The ‘cartel’ is enriched...
If my GP had paid attention to my PSA tests in the past, and if I had known to pay attention to it, I would not now have Stage 4 Prostate cancer and be condemned to a miserable, painful death.
People who write articles like this do so to reduce healthcare costs, not help men.
And a biopsy, while humiliating is not that big of deal.
If you have a sudden rise in your PSA, get a biopsy. And get you PSA tested annually after age 50.
These authors are full of shit.
BFL
Of course, I’m unmarried and childless but, if anyone told me I had cancer, my reply is “Feed me the pain meds and let me go. My Lord Jesus is ready to receive me.”
The medical community has already bankrupted me and, at age 68, I’ve seen as much of the world as I need to. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not looking to kill myself. But there’s nothing wrong with just accepting the inevitable if Jesus is your Savior.
Women hate it when I talk this way.
Years ago, a physician (a generation older than me) I knew socially and whose hobby reading was on "longevity" told me an anecdote from his old anatomy professor. More or less, it reflects your comment of today. Post mortems in anatomy classes reveal everybody's got something more than they think on its way towards death. From young to old. We are "fearfully and wonderfully made," asserts Psalm 139. Rather well to remember such in the midst of media screaming headlines to raise the blood pressure. All best.
I do understand the perspective, but from the other side, it killed my brother-in-law at 68. It was awful.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.