Panel’s Advice on Prostate Test Sets Up Battle (Obama's death panels alert)

NY Times ^ | 10/8/11 | GARDINER HARRIS

[jimbo123]

A day after a government panel said that healthy men should no longer get screened for prostate cancer, some doctors’ groups and cancer patients’ advocates began a campaign to convince the nation that the advice was misguided.

Their hope is to copy the success of women’s groups that successfully persuaded much of the country two years ago that it was a mistake for the same panel, the United States Preventive Services Task Force, to recommend against routine mammograms for women in their 40s.

[BenLurkin]

bttt

[ProudFossil]

Welcome to Obamacare!!! Hussein and the left want to kill off all those over 60, no doubt about it. I am a case in point. The PSA test caught my prostrate enlarging eight years ago. If I had not been having the annual test after I was 50, I would be dead now.

[EagleUSA]

The Soylent Green Corporation is back in business.....

[E. Pluribus Unum]

It's my understanding that the PSA gives lots of false-positives.

They need a better test.

[ETL]

National Health Care: Medicine in Germany 1918-1945 [Nazi health care]
Does the Modern Bureaucratization of Medicine Risk a Return to the Horrors of National Socialist Medicine?

by Marc S. Micozzi M.D.

Today we are concerned about issues such as doctor-assisted suicide, abortion, the use of fetal tissue, genetic screening, birth control and sterilization, health-care rationing and the ethics of medical research on animals and humans. These subjects are major challenges in both ethics and economics at the end of the twentieth century. But at the beginning of the twentieth century the desire to create a more scientific medical practice and research had already raised the issues of euthanasia, eugenics, and medical experimentation on human subjects. In addition, the increasing involvement of the German government in medical care and funding medical research established the government-medical complex that the National Socialists later used to execute their extermination policies. ..."

http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/national-health-care-medicine-in-germany-1918-1945/
______________________________________________________

Nazi Party

The National Socialist German Workers' Party (German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, abbreviated NSDAP), commonly known in English as the Nazi Party (from the German Nazi, abbreviated from the pronunciation of Nationalsozialist[5]), was a political party in Germany between 1919 and 1945. It was known as the German Workers' Party (DAP) prior to a change of name in 1920.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_Party

[goodnesswins]

Yes....my husband spent money to get a special MRI done...and then had HIFU in Mexico....because the US will not yet allow it (it’s less invasive, very successful)

[No Socialist]

They are doing the same thing with women’s tests. After having it drilled in our heads that we need to have mammograms every year and pap smears, all of a sudden these tests aren’t that important anymore. When the evil health insurance companies were paying for the tests, they were mandatory for women’s health. As the government family prepares to take over everyone’s health care, these tests aren’t necessary. Of course, I’m sure the important people, like those in government and their financial backers will still have the best preventative health care available.

[businessprofessor]

It's my understanding that the PSA gives lots of false-positives. They need a better test.

There is a better test, a prostate biopsy but it is painful, invasive, and expensive. PSA is done in combination with a finger test of the prostate. Both indicators are tracked over time to indicate the likely occurrence of prostate cancer. The PSA test is not a binary outcome. The test gives a result that is interpreted for possible action. The PSA threshold has been studied for a long time. The number of false positives is related to the threshold and the costs of false negatives.

I still want the PSA test. My father had a advanced form of prostate cancer. The cancer was treatable but he could have died much younger if the cancer had not been treated.

[Sooth2222]

Life insurance companies generally require PSA testing for men over a certain age and above a certain amount of insurance. If there is a problem with the test, it's because it's not being interpreted correctly, not because it doesn't provide valuable information.

Of course, the gov't can play fast and loose with the numbers because it's not their money and it's not their lives at stake.

[muawiyah]

United States Preventive Services Task Force should be made up of volunteers who agree to ever after forego any medical treatment of any kind from anyone ~ paid or unpaid.

[The Sons of Liberty]

The 0bama regime wants you dead. What's your wish for them?

FUBO GTFO! 470 Days until Noon Jan 20, 2013

[luckystarmom]

Thanks to the PSA test, my 50 year old cancer was diagnosed with cancer just last week.

It looks like it is aggressive and may have gone past his prostate. Hopefully, it is not in his bones.

I wish we would have caught it earlier.

[ExTexasRedhead]

In my opinion, Obama, Pelosi, Reid and their goon ilk are attempting to legalize and nationalize the second Holocaust. These wannabe dictators want to choose who lives and who dies; the ultimate power over the American people. This time it won’t just be Jews, gypsies, Russians, the mentally ill, etc. My bet is that all of us who post on FR are in their database.

If you disagree, I highly recommend you re-read the history of Germany throughout the 1930’s.

[Madam Theophilus]

From The Center of Medical Consumers:
Why Have a PSA Test?
http://medicalconsumers.org/2011/06/17/why-have-a-psa-test/

I also recommend reading H. Gilbert Welch’s book,
OVERDIAGNOSED: MAKING PEOPLE SICK IN THE PURSUIT OF HEALTH

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/overdiagnosis/

[unkus]

This time it won’t just be Jews, gypsies, Russians, the mentally ill, etc. My bet is that all of us who post on FR are in their database.

---

You can bet your life on it. No pun intended.

[Man from Oz]

I had a prostrate biopsy 3 years ago. Yes, it is an experience that I don’t want to experience again but I would do it again in a heart beat if my Urologist wanted one. In the meantime I am getting my PSA taken 2 x per year. Monitoring.....

[JLAGRAYFOX]

Believe me, I know the history of Germany, Russia, China, and....I know the history of Black Muslim slave traders, like Obama’s forebears!!! This gent, POTUS Obama, has ice running through his veins. I put nothing past him in his unqenchable thirst for power and control. He cares for no one but himself. He could, with seamless motion, join the despots of the world quite easily, and...would never lose a wink of sleep in the process!!! Americans, you put this would be tyrant in office, now.....grow up and throw him and his America destroyers out by forcing his immediate resignation or impeachment!!!

[stboz]

...grow up and throw him and his America destroyers out by forcing his immediate resignation or impeachment!!!

....to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

[aruanan]

When they said the test did more harm than good, they meant 2 of 3 things:

1. The tests cost, in aggregate, more per life saved or prolonged than what they consider should be spent saving or prolonging a life.

2. A false positive could lead to unnecessary prostate biopsy or surgery. Unnecessary procedures on a healthy patient do more harm than no procedures on the same patient.

3. Unnecessary procedures cost, in aggregate, more per life saved or prolonged than what they consider should be spent saving or prolonging a life.

I'm betting it was number 1 and 3.

Number 2 is unavoidable and that's what further tests are for, to detect that. If no tests at all were done on what they call "healthy" men, what would the costs be of treating something after it has gotten bad enough to manifest itself to the patient? For that matter, the point of the antigen test was to be able to spot something early enough that something more drastic did not have to be done and, thus, both preserve life and spare medical resources.