Prostate cancer screening’s false promise
http://www.cnn.com/2012/05/22/opinion/brawley-prostate-screening/index.html?hpt=hp_bn7
The first time I did any reading on prostate cancer was a number of years ago when my father-in-law had a positive PSA test. Based on my reading at the time there was a substantial likelihood that he could simply ignore the results and do fine (he is an EENT doctor, so clearly one able to do his own research and make his own decisions, I don’t think we ever talked about it). He chose to get surgery (he was a guinea pig for some NIH research) and I know he was incontinent for quite a while afterwards (months, a year perhaps). He slyly notes, though, that ‘everything works perfectly’, to my mother-in-law’s embarrassment, so all in all he seems to have escaped the worst side effects.
I have also read extensively about breast cancer (my mom was diagnosed a number of years ago (and we did talk about alternatives based on my research)) and the bulk of my research indicates that there is little value in mammograms for the same reason that there seems to be little value in the PSA test. If the exam only finds benign tumors (meaning ones that will never threaten the life of the patient, either because it grows so slow it never will be a problem no matter how long the patient lives, or the patient is old enough that she (or he, men get it also!) is likely to die of something else first), then in essentially all cases the treatment is worse than doing nothing. There is this really interesting study from Europe where a country (don’t recall which one, but some Scandinavian one I believe) had really excellent health records, but previously hadn’t offered mammograms to the general public. They looked at the death rate from breast cancer before and after the implementation of the screening and guess what? No change at all! That seems pretty damning to me that the screening is useless and when you think about all the angst these poor women went through, some going to far as to get mastectomies (I was able to help convince my mother go to with lumpectomy, though she elected to add on radiation treatments), the screening does far more harm than it does good. It seems quite crystal clear to me that the PSA test does exactly the same thing (meaning more harm than good) and I strongly suspect that there are plenty of other screening test that have the exact same problem (colonoscopy ranks right up there near the top to me).
Eat right, exercise regularly, look both ways before you cross the street, don’t marry a vengeful spouse and then cheat on her, those are the things that are smart and proven to help extend your life and health.
