Quote:
Originally Posted by ilovetv
Each to his own, but I don't think a yearly mammogram or routine PSA or 5-year colonoscopy are "looking hard enough and long enough until you find something".
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The author has a section on each type of cancer and I can't remember all of it, so I'll just try to give some information on prostate cancer (as best I can from memory). Before they started doing PSA tests, they kept track of the death rate from prostate cancer. On a graph, the death rate is pretty much shown as a level (steady) line over time (decades perhaps). Then when they started doing PSA tests they kept track of how many were done and that was represented by another line on the graph. It was a line that went up steeply over time. It was something over a million PSA tests. But as the number of PSA tests went up sharply, the death rate basically stayed the same. It went down ever so slightly toward the end of the graph but the author, a doctor, thinks that it was likely the result of better treatments that have come about in recent years.
Essentially, there's no benefit to speak of (overall) to giving PSA tests. But there are risks from getting biopsies and then unnecessary treatments and/or operations.
When they do prostate autopsies of men who have died from other causes, they are able to do a much more in depth screening of the prostate. They cut the prostate into very very thin slices and look carefully at as much of it as they can. When they do this, it turns out that there's much more cancer than anyone ever would have imagined. In other words, almost every man has some cancer in his prostate. The sampling they do by biopsy is nothing compared to what they do at autopsy.
But when someone is told they have "no cancer", after biopsy, they feel good, when actually it's likely they do have some cancer and it just wasn't detected.
If you look harder you'll find more: Yes, at biopsy, you can take 6, 8, 10, 15, 20 or more samples. And research has shown that the harder you look, the more you'll find.