Posted on 10/13/2011 11:48:09 AM PDT by Kaslin
Whenever I have a medical appointment, my wife inquires, "What did the doctor say?" I always give the same answer: "She said I'm going to die." Not because I have some fatal illness, but because life is a terminal condition.
Americans might keep that fact in mind in considering the recent news made by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force. It recently recommended against routine screening of healthy men for prostate cancer, on two grounds: The test doesn't save lives, on balance, and the treatments are usually worse than the disease.
Everyone who gets prostate cancer will die. But usually not from prostate cancer.
There are lessons in the task force report, both for individuals and for institutions that pay for screening of this sort. But chances are, those lessons will be ignored. In the American health care system, the pressures to do something, useful or not, are more powerful than the pressures to do nothing.
Prevention is a totem of modern medicine. Under his health care reform, President Barack Obama says, insurance companies will have to provide free mammograms and colonoscopies because "it saves money, and it saves lives." He stuck to this position even after this same Preventive Services Task Force came out against routine mammography for women under 50.
This is one of those conditions where ignorance can truly be bliss. Most men who live long enough will develop cancer of the prostate. And for most of them, it will be effectively harmless.
The idea of a harmless cancer may be hard to grasp. Typically, though, prostate cancer grows very slowly and has no symptoms, and by the time it gets around to killing you, you're already dead.
(Excerpt) Read more at townhall.com ...
I fell off a loose stool once. Man was that painful.
My skin doctor told my father in law to get into his doctor fast. He said he had just been. Odd, his own doctors missed pancreatic cancer.
Well, that sure depends on what study you are looking at. This is from the American Cancer Society.... http://acspressroom.wordpress.com/2011/10/07/u-s-panel-says-no-to-psa-screening/. “One study done in several European countries found that PSA screening reduced deaths from prostate cancer by about 20%. Another study done in the United States concluded that PSA screening did no such thing. In fact, in the US study, the deaths from prostate cancer were greater during the period of the study in men who were screened vs. those who were not, but that difference was not found to be statistically significant.”
I don’t think there is another issue in medicine that has so much misinformation surrounding it. There is some important history to this issue that is definitely worth noting.... particularly for men going through a worrying phase of “crap, I’ve just been told that I’ve got prostate cancer. The entire concept of conducting the PSA tests and using the results as a marker for early detection of cancer came about as the results of research conducted by Stanford University School of Medicine professor Dr. Thomas Stamey. In 1987, Dr. Stamey results were published in the New England Journal of Medicine and essentially, he showed that ‘increased blood PSA levels could be used to indicate prostate cancer’. So... for almost 20 year there has been this cookie cooker annual test that men over 50 take with all the doctors wagging their heads and murmuring “oh, you really should get this test because early detection is oh so important”. Great.... but what happened in 2004? Well, after doing research for the entire period from 1987 to 2004 on a few thousand prostate tissue samples by urologists at Stanford, Dr. Stamey released a new study where he effectively said “"The PSA era is over in the United States.... this new study raises very serious doubts as to whether ‘a man should even use a PSA test for prostate cancer screening anymore’. These results are in the October, 2004 issue of the Journal of Urology. By the way, Dr Stamey did not say that the PSA test should be abandoned completely.... just that it was not a useful predictor of prostate cancer. The results do indicate whether there is a harmless increase in prostate size i.e. the bigger the prostate, the larger the PSA number.
So there you have it.... the inertia of the complete medical profession continuing to propel this concept that the PSA test has any value at all....even though the author of the work upon which this is based may as well of declared “throw it out!” Let me tell you, I have a lot of respect for Dr Stamey to come out and refute his own findings nearly 20 years later. And how many prostates were unnecessarily removed during this period and at what cost to those people? Well, one can just view it as medicine doing the best it can but sometimes it goes down a wrong road. One last thing, there was another study done a few years ago that I’m sure I could lay my hands on if I had a bit of time.....it showed the results of biopsies of young men in the teens and 20s who had accidentally died and as I recollect, at least 10% of the prostates analyzed had cancer. What’s the conclusion to all this? Virtually all men (certainly by the time they reach the age of 60 or 70) have prostate cancer..... for some it will be obvious (and in a very few cases, it may even require removal) but for the rest it exists and remains relatively harmless. As for being concerned? Well, if all that has to happen is for doctors to just look a little hard to find it, it’s hard to be that concerned about it, no?
We need stories from men who have suffered the treatment. Then we can decide which is best for us personally.
We are born with cancer cells. If we maintain a strong immune system, our body can fight them. It helps to exercise and not fill your body with fat and sugar.
Bump to your post no. 6.
Bump to your post no. 8.
I think we can all agree that Obama/Pelosi DEATHCare was designed to speed death along for whomever Big Brother chooses. We can call it the DemocRAT Holocaust via Death Panels and rationed healthcare. Bend over and kiss your life goodbye thanks to Liberals in the US Congress.
I still don't understand how, after centuries of medical advances, the state of the art is a Dr. sticking a gloved finger up your butt.
Wtf, over?!?
I have also seen men treated for more aggressive forms of prostate CA. They have sometimes lost potency and sometimes developed secondary female sex characteristics. These are not urban legends.
Again, the reason statistics are invaluable is because reliance on anecdotes has an unacceptibly high error factor.
When it’s your nuts on the line, will you “sit and wait”? I’m talking about patients in their 60s, not 80s.
That's no PSA blood test. The digital rectal exam can also be used to get a sample to check for blood in the patient's stool.
This article is complete BS!
The article discusses the recommendation to discontinue population screening with the PSA test. You're different with your family history. It's a different kettle of fish.
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