Google: "The great American pseudo- epidemic of cancer of the prostate" and read the best article ever written on the subject from the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics in 1996. 1996!!! Everything!!! And I mean EVERYTHING in that article has only been reinforced by study after study since then. People in some other countries saw the PSA era for what it was a long time ago.

Note that P.S. The Indian Journal I referenced is as legitimate as source as any medical journal in the world and by the way there is no U.S. Journal of Medical Ethics. If you know nothing of the ins and outs of medical publishing -- authors usually submit to the most prestigious (say NEJM) and if rejected work their way down the list. The author was an M.D. and Professor Emertitus at Stanford University in the USA. For that reason alone I'm certain that he probably tried and failed to get it published in a more widely distributed journal in this country ... and probably began that process years before it ended up where it did. He was spot on in his early take on PSA testing and the harm it was causing. Apparently no one in this country wanted to hear it. If you ask me the politics of money and the medical industrial complex is the ONLY reason his argument was never given a wider audience ... and that is a damn shame. I look forward to the day when the NEJM issues a Dr. McCauley a posthumous apology (he recently passed away).

This was written in honor of the late great George Carlen. After coming from a Yankees game where he encountered "Free" PSA Screening. Read it as George would have told it at one of his concert dates:

In a capitalist society the value of any test can be seen in the "market" price you can charge for it. With "free" a PSA test you are getting exactly what its worth ... ZERO... the price you paid for it. PSA TESTING IS WORTHLESS. Are you kidding! This is the USA! If I invented a test that would actually save someone's life I might charge $10,000 for it! I wouldn't give it away for FREE! And if it was really saving lives, I wouldn't be able to keep up with the demand. Do drug companies give their life saving drugs away for free? Do hospitals give life saving operations away for FREE? Does anybody give away anything worthwhile for FREE in this society? Not on your life! In the good old USA you usually get what you pay for.Don't you think its interesting that 15 or 20 years ago, when the test was first being marketed ... you never saw free PSA screenings? Why now all of sudden the last few years?With the new Yankee Stadium there was a lot of press about the cost of tickets ... with many in the thousand dollar range. Can you imagine someone setting up a booth at the stadium and putting up a big sign: SAVE YOUR LIFE! Get a PSA test for only $1000 dollars! $1000 sounds like a pretty good deal to me! I might even take 10 of those! But you know and I know that booth would be empty the entire game. People will pay a $1000 to watch a silly ballgame but not $1000 to save their life! What the hell is that all about!

Free is the "come on" for all sorts of marketing scams. People will unthinkingly accept all kinds of things for free. On the other hand for $1000 dollars ... people tend to start asking questions ... and "THEY" don't really want that ... THEY want you start asking the questions "after" they tell you that you have cancer! The FREE part is to just to get you in the door. You know and I know that the "real money,"THE BIG MONEY to be made comes later ... when the sucker you drew into your tent becomes a money generating "customer/patient "for the rest of his {} life! If the Yankees and whoever were really concerned about "saving lives" they might have set up a booth to screen people for alcoholism! The stands sure seem to be full of them whenever I'm at a ballpark! Alcoholism kills about 3X the number of people who die from prostate cancer each year. Look it up: "Alcohol abuse kills some 75000 Americans each year and shortens the lives of these people by an average of 30 years! " Three times as many people! And these are lives you could REALLY save! Not lives you'll just screw up by unnecessarily scaring the hell out of people by telling them they have a psuedo-disease that shouldn't even be called "cancer" and that 100% men will get if they live long enough. Many alcoholics are young people in the prime of their lives! 30 years! Prostate cancer doesn't even shorten most men's lives by anywhere near 30 years! Do you know why you don't see something like "free" alcoholism screening at Yankee Stadium or anywhere else? NO MONEY IN IT! ...... NO MONEY IN IT! .... Lots to be made selling alcohol and $10 beers to the alcoholics. But really care about them after they leave the stadium -- FORGET ABOUT IT. And treating alcoholism ... forget that too ... no where near the money to be made when you can reel in a bogus cancer patient for the rest of his life. Ain't capitalism great!

Any discussion of prostate cancer is incomplete without mentioning a common side effect of surgical removal of the prostate; Peyronies Disease. This disease, for which there is no satisfactory treatment, results from formation of penile scar tissue, makes intercourse difficult or impossible and is often accompanied by excruciating pain. It was reported in the 02, June 2008, edition of Medical News Today that almost 20% of men developed this condition after removal of the prostate.

When I developed this condition, I was unaware that a disease like this even existed. In frustration, I started an informational website, www.curepeyronies.net Every email I get describes a man in a desperate situation with nowhere to turn. Urologists must do a better job of informing patients of this rather side effect, so they will be able to give informed consent before undergoing treatment.

Capitalism is great at marketing and creating demand. Cancer fears, "free" prostate screenings (but curiously, not free treatments); and don't forget to get your "free brake inspection" at Midas -- they really care about your safety ...there's no real difference. Its all a part of the "ask your doctor if ______ is right for you" philosophy of medical care. Get people in the door -- more patients = more profits for all involved ... its as simple as that. PSA testing has been a boon for our "for profit" medical system and a travesty of unnecessary mutilation and death for many American men.

PSA testing was a great concept on paper. It was introduced without proper scientific evidence of efficacy. Our "for profit" health system took the ball and blindly charged forward with it, ruining many lives in the process. Thankfully, that train is finally slowly down a bit, with the release of multiple studies showing the extent of all the needless treatment -- but the special interests are fighting it all the way -- paradoxically supported by many victims (aka "cancer survivors") who understandably don't want to hear that their debilitating surgeries and treatments may have been for nothing.

Here is my own testimonial. In the early 90's, in those early days of PSA, my father was first diagnosed with prostate cancer at 85 years of age based upon a PSA test and nothing else! At 85! As he was happily going about enjoying the last years of his life a urologist, an m.d. who took a do no harm oath, sat him down and told him he had "incurable" cancer. But not to worry, the doctor said, we have a great treatment that will probably hold the cancer at bay -- and it involved regular painful injections at the doctor's office. That "big C" diagnosis psychologically devastated my Dad for all his remaining days.

A few years after my father died at age 89 (of congestive heart failure) this story hit the national news: "Pharmaceutical Companies to Pay $1.2B in Medicare Fraud" "Prosecutors also indicted six current and former employees of TAP -- including Alan MacKenzie, now the president of Takeda Pharmaceuticals North America -- charging them with conspiracy to pay kickbacks to doctors if they prescribed Lupron. The kickbacks included trips to resorts, medical equipment and money offered to the doctors as ''educational grants,'' prosecutors said."

The drug company got fined -- a few of the worst offending doctors also paid fines - but none lost their licenses -- instead they got to continue on with their unethical practices. This is the kind of health care the idiots at these town hall meetings are fighting to keep?

I seriously considered looking up my dad's urologist and trying to arrange a meeting with him and a baseball bat -- to my father, a doctor's word was God's -- what a violation of trust! Instead I became determined to learn as much as I could about prostate cancer and to help as many men as I could to avoid becoming an AUA and AMA sanctioned victim of prostate cancer for profit.

Who in the world wouldn't support 'early detection and treatment.' Nice words. But first you need an accurate method of early detection (there is none for aggressive prostate cancer) and then you need a treatment that works (there is none for aggressive prostate cancer). Its just unfortunate but its true, anyone who tells you otherwise is just repeating the medical industrial complex's PSA marketing hype. If there were I'd be all for it ... anyone in their right mind would be all for it.

Prostate cancer simply should not be called cancer. Autopsy studies of men who died from trauma show that 8% of men in their 20's already have prostate "cancer." That percentage increases with every decade of life until it reaches 100% of men who reach age 100. By definition any condition that will affect 100% of all men has to be a derivative of NORMAL aging. It makes evolutionary sense. Most species are born, mature, reproduce and die. Modern man has found a way to long outlive the evolutionary usefulness of his prostate gland. Which as an aside, has led to our current dilemma. We can accept that degeneration as a normal part of aging, knowing it will vary from person to person and some of us unfortunately just won't make it because for some unknown and undetectable reason it becomes aggressive -- or we can try to "fight"each and every case we find, as most do even in vain (because there is no treatment scientifically proven to be superior to doing nothing), or just because fighting for the sake of fighting is the "American way" -- doing something ... anything ... has to be better than DOING nothing (not in this case). In fact fighting is what American's love to do ... and the industrial medical complex has them conditioned to do just that ... and afterwards they'll pin a ribbon on their chest and proudly and loudly proclaim themselves "survivors." You know and I know and every urologist knows -- tell a man he has cancer in this country and the one and only universal reaction is to "fight" and "cut it out." Not fighting is cowardly and downright un-American. "What! ... you just want to watch and wait!" ... "You must be French!" Its all very consistent with our national materialistic obsession with quantity over quality [of life].

Throughout our history there have been medicine men and hucksters peddling ineffectual magic elixirs for longevity -- they are still out there today taking advantage of the gullible among us -- and our current era of "for profit" medicine has bestowed an unjustified air of respectability on too many of them. "Do no harm" ... has been thrown by the wayside in the case of prostate cancer anyway.

"Early treatment" for what we now call prostate "cancer" will probably work to save some lives. By definition that would involve removing the prostate of every man soon after he reaches his sexual peak ... say at 18 years of age!

Its really a great idea. If you're all for it, I suggest that you bring it up at the next town hall meeting with your congressman. Maybe they'll include it in Obama's health care bill.

Google: "An elusive tumor in a man who has evidence of prostate cancer metastasis" the article is about imaging techniques but the interesting thing is the patient's case history. A man who apparently thought he was doing all the right things, catching his cancer "early." A radical prostatectomy 11 years ago at 54, PSA only 3.0, Gleason only 6, he was told his "disease was organ-confined with no lymph nodes involved and now he's suffering from metastatic prostate cancer in his lung. All of the latest studies released in 2009 followed men for 10 years. Metastasis of slow growing prostate tumors caused by all these unnecessary surgeries can take a long time to show up. The supposed benefits of aggressively treating all prostate cancers to possibly save a few lives may disappear when longer term studies become available.

Google: "A biopsy can stimulate the inflammation that helps the cancer," and You can read about the guy who developed the theory that biopsies can cause inflammation that may lead to metastasis. Its highly technical but if you read it through to the end you'll get to the point (pun intended) in plain language. This isn't wacko "alternative" medicine --this is cutting edge research at a reputable medical research institute. "Of course, the primary culprit in all these cancers remains inflammation, which is looming ever larger as cancer's all around helpmate, potentially even when it comes to something as routine as a biopsy, a procedure long associated with cancer treatment." In that case study of the guy with lung metastasis, it came from somewhere -- was it the biopsy or his surgery. I say he might have been just fine and lived a full life had he never had a PSA test and never been told he had cancer.

Sometimes you see studies trying to knock "watchful waiting" by citing the number of participants who eventually decide to seek treatment. Other than the simple fact that its difficult for most people to live with a "cancer" diagnosis (however bogus that may be) ... it could also be because the "watchful" part is not benign observation. It consists of repeated biopsies every so often to monitor a cancer progression that may well be accelerated by the repeated biopsies in the first place. A good analogy may be the observer effect in quantum physics (it refers to changes that the act of observing will make on the phenomenon being observed). Take two identical twins with identical prostate tumors -- one is unobserved (not biopsied) and the observed (biopsied). The current medical establishment still considers both tumors identical -- but this research suggests that the biopsied one may be forever changed with respect to metastatic potential -- having being affected by the inflammation caused by the biopsy.

Screening, "early detection" and treatment of a "disease" that 100% of men will have if they live to be 100 is big business in this country -- it is the industry equivalent of a "blockbuster" drug.. It has been commercialized by the widespread introduction and persistent use of an unproven test (PSA) to create a whole class of new bogus "cancer" patients. The medical industrial complex's exploitation of "cancer" fears rivals that of Bush's terrorism fear campaign. Fear sells ... and hospitals and doctors have been getting rich pandering to it.

A recent CNN news release carries this statement: " The germ, a type of parasite, can infect the prostate and may cause inflammation that spurs the growth of prostate cancer later in life, says senior author Lorelei Mucci, Ph.D., an assistant professor of epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health. "Our underlying hypothesis is around inflammation and, in particular, we believe that inflammation from a variety of sources is leading to prostate cancer progression," she says."

Hmmm ... inflammation! Where have we heard that before? How about?

"A biopsy can stimulate the inflammation that helps the cancer," J.L. Luo M.D. Phd. Scripps Researcher when speaking about prostate cancer.

Inflammation appears not to be a good thing when it comes to prostate cancer. In the case of inflammation caused by this STD "those (men) with a past trichomonas infection were two to three times more likely to develop an aggressive and potentially life-threatening form of prostate cancer."

The inventor of the PSA test said "all you need is an excuse to biopsy and you'll find cancer." (Google quote for source) PSA testing has provided that excuse. A biopsy may very well be a great diagnostic tool for many medical conditions but prostate cancer isn't one of them. I've brought this subject up with many doctors (some who are friends) and while many admitted to privately subscribing to the risk of biopsies -- more than one has responded " well ... we can verify your cancer now via biopsy or we can do it later on the autopsy table. Take your pick" (I think its something they must teach them in med school - How to Deal with the Reluctant Patient 101) Fear sells and in so many words they are saying "we have no choice."

BUT YOU DO HAVE A CHOICE!

Ask yourself if it is worth it for a pseudo-disease that has a benign course for almost all men throughout most of their lives.

Ask yourself if it is worth it for a pseudo-disease for which "no treatment has been PROVEN to be superior to doing nothing at all." (Google that quote for 2008 NY Times article)

Ask yourself if it is worth it for a pseudo-disease that the medical-industrial complex insists on calling "cancer" but might better be called "Age-related-prostate degeneration."

Ask yourself if its worth for a pseudo-disease that recent research has conclusively proven to be overdiagnosed and overtreated to the tune of 1 million men in this country in just the past few years.

Repeating over and over the number of men who die from prostate cancer each year is clearly a part of the scare tactics of all the fear-based Prostate Cancer "Awareness" campaigns. The implication always is that all 27,000 of these men could be be somehow saved if they were only made "aware" of prostate cancer early enough. The facts are that many, if not most of these 27,000 have aggressive cancers for which no amount of early detection or treatment will ever help. The facts are that many, if not most of the these 27,000 are elderly who would never ethically be treated and eventually have to die of something. That leaves very very few remaining to be "saved" by an ineffective, massively disproportionate, screening program that has ensnared millions of men and already harmed many of them.

I don't ascribe to any vast conspiracy or any even any evil intent by anyone involved in this PSA fiasco. The evil is in that mindless all consuming profit machine called the medical-industrial complex. (It really unbelievable that they've been able to enlist so many of their victims to help in the fight to maintain the status quo but on the other hand, 1.3 million men unnecessarily walking around impotent and in diapers, but thinking their lives have been saved by American medicine can help muster a powerful army of supporters)

People can and do rationalize all kinds of things to be able to sleep at night ... as I'm sure the guards at Treblinka somehow did -- and as I'm am sure many urologists did and still do. Many have somehow convinced themselves that they are doing the right thing. Before PSA testing urologists didn't have all that much to do -- but since the introduction of PSA, I am certain that incomes of urology as a specialty have skyrocketed. Somebody got paid for those 1.3 million unnecessary surgeries these last few years.

If a study is ambiguous, as most are, the "system" will tend interpret it to continue to maximize the bottom line. Many doctors and hospitals (elements of the "system"), have fallen on the greed gravy train -- more patients = more profits, its as simple a that. But convinced they are saving lives, many urologists may view the fact that they are making lots of money doing it is just a little side benefit -- they see the Wall Street wiz kids making billions shuffling money around -- its taken them 12 years of hard work to get where they are -- if anybody deserves the big money, its someone heroically saving lives -- like they are by treating prostate cancer (even if its only 1 life in 50 -- as a big study from Europe showed this year) (and the fact that those other 49 men are patients for life is just another nice side benefit).

In my experience talking to many urologists -- they are often perplexed when I ask them about one study or another. Many if not most don't have the time or interest to keep up with the state of the art and do their own research. They leave all that to their special interest group and cover organization, the AUA (American Urological Association) . Two weeks after those two big studies last March showing no benefit to PSA screening, the AUA went and changed its guidelines, they completely disregarded the science and LOWERED the recommended age for screening from 50 to 40! Totally unbelievable! But maybe smart ... they are probably well aware that sometimes the best defense is a good offense. They see the train coming and they want to slow it down ... or more likely it could just be that over the past 20 years they have completely depleted the 50 and 60 year old patient pool and there are still lots of swimming pool and McMansion payments their members have to make!

The AUA issues "guidelines" and many, if not most urologists blindly follow them. It serves two purposes -- first,they don't have to do any independent thinking -- and second, it provides excellent cover in case they get sued for malpractice.

But eerily "I was just following the guidelines of my profession" does sound a lot like "I was just following the orders of my superiors"

True studies on the effectiveness of cancer treatments are difficult if not impossible because no one wants to be in the control group. Just about everyone told they have cancer wants to do something, anything to treat it -- proven or unproven. The closest thing we have to a control group for prostate cancer is watchful waiting. I submit that all of those watchful waiting controls have been contaminated by biopsy. In 2009, studies are finally available showing little to no difference between watchful waiting and treatment groups. But "no difference" could actually mean a HIGHER death rate for both groups than would occur in an unscreened, unbiopsied, untreated group (in other words -- men just left alone).

Of course studies are designed to minimize variables. If they are evaluating death from prostate cancer between treatment and watchful waiting groups -- anyone who dies from other causes is not included: i.e.: men who die on the operating table, men who die from other complications of surgery or hospitalization or medication errors, or those who might contract antibiotic resistant staph infections, or even subsequent suicides due to post operative depression -- all of which would make the slight advantages shown in the treatment group statistics much worse.

On the other hand many of those same factors could affect men receiving biopsies as part of watchful waiting. I really don't like testimonials but sometimes they are useful to illustrate a point. Incidents like the following are also never recorded in the various prostate studies: my neighbor, just who turned 50, went for his "50 year physical," blood test PSA=7, they tell him to come back in 2 months, PSA = 10, then biopsy, 2 days later a 104 fever, ER in the middle of the night, e coli infection into his blood from the biposy despite pre/post antibiotics, all his organs affected, double pneumonia, 3 & 1/2 weeks in the hospital, mostly the ICU, touch and go for a while, nearly died. And what about his biopsy? All cores negative!

I am as certain that some people are killed by prostate biopsies as they are by the complications of surgeries. How many times it happens is a little more difficult to ascertain. They are lost to the statistics of hospital mistakes and errors (aka complications). This immediate risk is added to the long term risk that biopsies may cause inflammation which is linked to the development of aggressive prostate cancer and metastasis. Biopsies may be a great diagnostic tool for many medical conditions, but prostate cancer isn't one of them. One doctor I spoke with likened it to walking in the jungle and poking a sleeping tiger with a stick.

Autopsy surveys of men who die of trauma find prostate cancer in 8% of 20 year olds. That percentage continues to increase with every decade of life until it reaches 100% of men who live to be 100. For the most part PSA testing and biopsies are detecting this normal component of aging. Since there is no way to predict the future course of cancer in any individual, telling these men they have "cancer" leads to "cut it out" surgeries in almost every instance. For the most part these are surgeries of pseudo-cancers that would have never threatened their lives.

This year the risks of PSA testing are finally being exposed for all to see. As the 1996 article I first referenced foretold, men being subjected to PSA screeing were subjects of an experiment -- without being informed of that fact. In 2009 we can finally say that the overwhelming data clearly shows that the harms of PSA testing far outweigh the benefits.

Google "STANFORD RESEARCHER DECLARES 'PSA ERA IS OVER' IN PREDICTING PROSTATE CANCER RISK" and read what the inventor of the PSA test said about it in 2004! But nobody listened. Too many people were making too much money mutilating too many men. He says: "All you need is an excuse to biopsy the prostate and you are going to find cancer." He says that researchers examined the prostates of healthy men who died from trauma, finding that 8 percent of those in their 20s already had prostate cancer! Would catching cancer in a 25 year old be "early enough."

Early detection of prostate cancer is now and has been an outright fraud. But we may yet get to screening 20 year olds if our "for profit" health care system continues on its present course. September was Prostate Cancer "Awareness" month. What a joke! Brought to you by Glaxo-Smithcline and the makers of the DaVinci robot. You'd have to be living in a cave the last 20 years not to be aware of PC. This was nothing more than a search for new patients/customers to feed the great american medical industrial complex profit machine.

Google: "At 32, a Decision: Is Cancer Small Enough to Ignore?" and read a Pulitzer Prize winning article about a poor guy who inadvertently got a PSA test when he was 29 and after numerous biopsies and consultations around the country was facing a radical prostatectomy at 32! Very very sad. I've asked the Wall Street Journal for a follow up story many times without a response -- maybe Kelly has the resources to find out what eventually happened to this poor guy?

Kelly might also win a Pulitzer Prize herself if she were to publicize and pursue the whole prostate biopsy issue. Find and interview the researcher I referenced earlier J.L. Luo.

Prostate biopsy appears to be a real risk and it has been totally ignored. Most consider it a benign test. It is not. Look at the extreme, consider this hypothetical: Biopsy a hundred 20 year olds and you would find cancer in 8 of them. Then what? Watchful waiting/Active surveillance ... or whatever you want to call it? Keep asking them to come back every year for the next 40 or 50 or 60 years for more biopsies? Ridiculous!

I contend that no one really knows what these biopsies may be doing to the cancer. It could be that men choosing "cut it out" surgeries may have been unknowingly "doing the right thing" for the wrong reason. Not for what the cancer might have done to them ... but because of what the biopsy might have done to their cancer!

Although PSA screening eradicated advanced prostate cancer from the population, there was a downside.

According to Welch's report in August JNCI, one million men were overdiagnosed and overtreated for prostate cancer over the last twenty years.

Why was PSA Screening for Prostate Cancer, a 20 year failed Medical Experiment ? Get the whole story here...

http://jeffreydach.com/2009/10/01/psa-testing-the-failed-medical-experiment-by-jeffrey-dach-md.aspx

Just wanted to add my two cents and report my disappointment with the results of my radical prostatectomy at Hopkins Brady Urological dept in 2008 ..Although I was operated on by an 'experienced' surgeon with more than 2000 procedures under his belt,I ended up incontinent at age 60. Despite the poor job they did to me,the urology dept at Hopkins is top rated in US News and World Report.Take that with a grain of salt. My experience was that they are more interested in quantity than quality these days. My surgeon abandoned me after he did his thing. Hopkins has a lot of world class departments,but in my opinion,their Urology dept needs much improvement to live up to their reputation.

'What do you think?' About doctors discussing the PSA question with their patients/clients! Struggling with advanced Prostate cancer as I was through 2008 the four doctors at the same surgery that I saw - discussed nothing - they had not a clue. It took a fifth doctor (in the same practice) to recommend a PSA test - too late. Talk with your doctor about it? They have already been told not to push PSA tests apparently, there is not enough money in it...