McDougall: Men Should Avoid Prostate Cancer PSA Screening
Dr. McDougall points out that a popular US television talk show called the Larry King Show was used as an advertising platform to promote very harmful Prostate Cancer PSA Screening with the use of celebrity personalities John McEnroe, Michael Milken, and Dr. Christopher Rose. In that show they recommended that all men over the age of 40 years undergo PSA examinations in order to find prostate cancer. Business, profits, greed… harm.
Dr. McDougall exposed:
Follow the Money
By no coincidence the primary support for early detection of prostate cancer through PSA testing comes from medical trade organizations. The best example is the American Urological Association, representing the special interests of over 16,500 members (mostly people from areas of urology and oncology) and funded by industries such as GlaxoSmithKline, Lilly, Novartis, Pfizer, and many other companies that derive their income from men with prostate cancer.
What these business interests are doing is Disease Mongering
“…is the selling of sickness that widens the boundaries of illness and grows the markets for those who sell and deliver treatments. It is exemplified most explicitly by many pharmaceutical industry-funded disease-awareness campaigns—more often designed to sell drugs than to illuminate or to inform or educate about the prevention of illness or the maintenance of health…Disease mongering turns healthy people into patients, wastes precious resources, and causes iatrogenic (induced by a physician) harm.â€
Ray Moynihan
Science writer for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and the British Medical Journal
All this PSA testing and medical treatment is just plain junk, pointless, and useless.
On the surface it would appear that the early detection of cancer in the prostate by any means would result in a longer life for men with less risk of dying from prostate cancer. However, research finds otherwise. The first report from the Prostate, Lung, Colorectal, and Ovarian (PLCO) Cancer Screening Trial on the effect of screening with prostate specific antigen (PSA) testing and digital rectal examination (DRE) on the rate of death from prostate cancer was published in the New England Journal of Medicine, March 26, 2009—PSA and DRE saved no lives.8 The second landmark report, published in the same issue, was from Europe and it showed an absolute reduction of less than 1 death in every 1000 men getting PSA tests.9 There are two reasons why PSA testing fails to save lives: first, extremely few biopsy-proven cancers are life threatening, and second, early detection is a myth.
And the real harms of prostate diagnosis is:
When you agree to take a PSA test you are gambling for the possibility that the test will detect a cancer that can be successfully treated and give you more quality years of life. Think for a moment. You are placing your bet on an extremely small chance of a theoretical benefit that may occur in the far distant future. If your PSA test is positive (there is a 10% chance it will be) and the biopsy results reveal cancer (there is more than a 30% chance it will) then the harms that follow are immediate, real, life changing, and for all men discovered (100%).
Simply being diagnosed with cancer changes a person forever. New policies for health and life insurance are no longer available. Finding desirable employment is less likely. Once the diagnosis is made the label of “cancer victim†sticks for life. Daily reminders come from family, friends, doctor’s visits, and stories in the media about cancer. Worry and anxiety dominate the patient’s and his family’s life. His future becomes a question mark. Every body pain is interpreted as a recurrence. The cancer victim becomes isolated from the rest of the world.15
Then there are the side effects from the treatments. The Prostate Cancer Outcomes Study reported that urinary leakage (incontinence) was more common with radical prostatectomy (35%) than with radiation therapy (12%) or androgen deprivation (11%). Erectile dysfunction occurred frequently after all treatments (radical prostatectomy, 58%; radiation therapy, 43%; androgen deprivation, 86%).16 Incontinence means wet pants, diapers, and sometimes lifelong need for a catheter in the man’s bladder. The results of the Prostate Cancer Outcomes Study are conservative. Likely, more than 80% of prostate cancer patients develop erectile dysfunction, regardless of whether they have surgery or external radiation therapy. And these are only two of the many side effects that occur from the best that medicine has to offer the man with a positive PSA test.
Please read up on the full McDougall Newsletter Larry King Live on Prostate Cancer Screening (PSA)