John pledges not to get his prostate checked:

http://bloggingheads.tv/video.php?id=356




Which cancer screenings work?:

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn41..._n12569684/pg_1

Although your article is 3 years old, the points are still valid.
We are saving lives graciously through appropriate screening. Mammography still identifies early and easy to treat brest cancer.

Colon cancer is a major illness, but caught early is a snap to treat. Annual Occult blood tests (easy as pie to do) starting at age 40 is enormously successful. Colonoscopy is now simple and fast. Screening at 50 saves lives.

Prostate Cancer can easily be diagnosed with annual PSA blood tests starting around 50 years old. If the rate of change is rapid, a biopsy should be done. Digital rectal exam is probably useless in an asymptomatic man with a low PSA. Early detection allows us to use a very simple and highly effective therapy that cures prostate cancer without surgery.

Skin cancer screening takes few minutes and should be part of your annual check up. When in doubt, cut it off and send it to the lab. I've taken off oodles of harmless looking "moles" that turned out to be cancerous.

Menstruating women should get an annual pap smear. Young women should get the cervical cancer vaccine. It works!

Screening for lung cancer remains controversial. For now, the best advice is DONT SMOKE. If you were a smoker, get a CT scan at the first sign of bloody sputum, a cough that won't quit or unexplained weight loss.

If you were a smoker never forget that most BLADDER cancer is caused by smoking. Check a urine once a year at your physical.

Most of the rest of the "cancers" are much rarer, so individualized screening is less efficient, but at your annual physical, with a complete review of systems, head to toe and a complete set of labs, including CBC and a Complete metabolic profile you should be able to detect problems early. Case in point - a woman I've known for years felt well, but at age 81 on her annual exam was found to have an elevated alkaline phosphatase on her blood test. This was the only thing abnormal. Alkalkine phos can be found in bone or liver problems. We went digging deeper and found cancer that had metastasized to the bone. We then found her primary source and cured her. She'd be dead, after suffering, if she hadn't come in for her physical.

Make good choices.

mm

Testing saves less than one life in a thousand and has its own perils. The great majority of men who get chopped about as a result would have been OK if left alone

Prostate proposal risky

In 2003, Professor Alan Coates, then 58 and head of Cancer Council Australia, admitted he had not had, and wasn't planning to have, a test to see if he had prostate cancer. Wayne Swan, a prostate cancer survivor, called his statement "public policy vandalism".

Coates was not a lone heretic. While it would be rare to find a smoker working in cancer control, or any woman in the same field who had not had a Pap smear, many men who know much about the evidence on whether prostate testing saves lives have not been tested themselves.

A study in 2002 of male GPs in Victoria aged over 48 found less than half had been tested; many physicians choose to remain ignorant about whether they have the disease. What do they know that the Urological Society of Australia and New Zealand does not?

The society has recommended 40 as the age for men to consider having their first prostate-specific antigen test, or PSA, and for those in the top half of PSA levels to be considered higher risk and "monitored closely". Those with lower levels could have less frequent testing.

Earlier this year, results from a European trial involving 160,000 men aged 55-69 were published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Only some were given PSA tests. It showed that if you screen 1000 men, you will find 82 cases, and if you follow these men for an average of nine years, there will be 2.94 deaths. In 1000 unscreened men over the same period, 48 cases of prostate cancer will come to light by men presenting symptoms to their doctor. There will be 3.65 deaths. The difference between the two means, in short, testing saves 0.71 deaths per 1000 men over nine years.

Prostate cancer is a disease from which you are more likely to die very late in life. For elderly men - those over 84 - the death rate is 767 per 100,000 men, while for those aged 40 to 44 it is 0.3. This means there will be one death per year from prostate cancer in every 330,000 men aged 40-44, an age group the Urological Society now believes should be tested


http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/prostate-pro...90923-g2l1.html

So are you going to get tested or ignore it?

mm

Gotta say, while I'm iffy on when the best time to screen for prostate cancer is, my father and his doc caught it early (and early) in his 70's.

It was an inconvenience.

Cancer.

An inconvenience. No invasive surgery. No radical and clumsy excisions. Hot flashes and a bit of discomfort.

Gotta love medical progress. I'd like to keep it coming.

Here's a fun way to spend an hour in Tulsa: We have a "Bend Over Mobile"

TULSA – For the fifth year in a row, KJRH 2 Works for You has partnered with Saint Francis Health Systems to bring the National Prostate Cancer Coalition’s free prostate cancer screenings to Tulsa onboard the Drive Against Prostate Cancer bus. In addition, this year’s event will also include free screening services by the Tulsa Downtown Lions Club’s Mobile Health Unit (MSU) as well as a blood drive being conducted by the Oklahoma Blood Institute (OBI). The Lions Club will offer free screenings for diabetes, blood pressure, glaucoma, visual acuity, hearing and bone density. The free screenings and blood drive will be conducted on a first-come, first serve basis.



I think it's a great idea.
But I do feel sorry for the doctor.
All day long. Nothing but A-holes!

The Great Prostate Mistake

By RICHARD J. ABLIN

EACH year some 30 million American men undergo testing for prostate-specific antigen, an enzyme made by the prostate. Approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 1994, the P.S.A. test is the most commonly used tool for detecting prostate cancer.

The test’s popularity has led to a hugely expensive public health disaster. It’s an issue I am painfully familiar with — I discovered P.S.A. in 1970.

The European study showed a small decline in death rates, but also found that 48 men would need to be treated to save one life. That’s 47 men who, in all likelihood, can no longer function sexually or stay out of the bathroom for long.

I never dreamed that my discovery four decades ago would lead to such a profit-driven public health disaster. The medical community must confront reality and stop the inappropriate use of P.S.A. screening. Doing so would save billions of dollars and rescue millions of men from unnecessary, debilitating treatments.


Richard J. Ablin is a research professor of immunobiology and pathology at the University of Arizona College of Medicine and the president of the Robert Benjamin Ablin Foundation for Cancer Research.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/10/opinion/...blin&st=cse

America Loses Its War on Cancer

There is a front page story in the NY Times today showing how although death rates from heart disease and stroke have plummeted by more than 50% since 1950 the death rate from cancer has dropped by only 5%.

This belies the much touted “war on cancer” which has been trumpeted in the media and amongst our leading medical institutions. I have long been annoyed by the cancer medical machine. The thing the bothers me the most about it how much people out and out lie (doctors, journalists, healthcare administrators) about the effectiveness of their treatments and so-called progress in this field.

Doug Bremner MD, physician, researcher, Professor of Psychiatry and Radiology at Emory University School of Medicine and the Atlanta VAMC in Atlanta GA.

http://www.beforeyoutakethatpill.com/index...-war-on-cancer/

Should I Be Tested for Cancer?: Maybe Not and Here's Why

Gilbert Welch, M.D., Professor of Medicine at Dartmouth Medical School, written while he was a Visiting Scientist at the International Agency for Research on Cancer - the cancer section of the WHO in Lyon, France.

H. Gilbert Welch, MD, MPH, has written an unusually understandable revelation of the folly of testing for cancer in people with no symptoms. He explains how only a few people will benefit from common tests such as PSA, fecal blood, mammograms and others. He is enough of an insider to be able to explain the flaws in clinical trials being used by "authorities" to recommend extensive testing, and the lack of trials in some cases. The unneccessary biopsies, surgeries, radiations, chemotherapies for slow-growing cancers or even non-malignant ones are presented bravely.

The deaths caused by cancer treatment are aired. This is something very few people, even MDs, know. Even when a treatment can cut the deaths from a particular cancer in half, most current treatments create non-cancer deaths, many of which will be improperly reported.

There are good explanations of how 5-year survival rates are calculated, how age-adjustments are made, how randomization for trials is done, and other things not even taught in medical school, but reserved for medical researchers.


http://www.amazon.com/Should-Be-Tested-Can...e/dp/0520248368

So you are not going to get appropriate screening? Or your wife/sister/mother/grandmother/friends? How come the hundreds of happy survivors in my practice are glad we caught their cancers early enough to treat? Are we/they wrong to be alive? Proper screening properly applied saves lives.

mm

Well I went back this year.
This "private" screening was surprisingly public when the local TV station came in as I was preparing to enter the exam room.
I was given coffee and a bagel, a book signed by Dr. Oz, stabbed with a needle, raped by a lady with short fingernails and warm hands, and got on the local TV news, all while in the back of a motorhome!
I've got to get off meth.
LOL!

Cochrane Colloboration -- Screening for prostate cancer

1410 men would need to be screened to prevent one additional death from prostate cancer during a 9-year period, which is also associated with 48 men needing to be treated

Prostate cancer is one of the most prevalent forms of cancer in men worldwide. Screening for prostate cancer requires diagnostic tests to be performed in the absence of any symptoms or indications of disease. These tests include the digital rectal examination (DRE), the prostate-specific antigen (PSA) blood test and the transrectal ultrasound-guided biopsy (TRUS). Screening aims to identify cancers at an early and treatable stage, therefore increasing the chances of successful treatment while also improving a patient's future quality of life.

This review identified five relevant studies, comprising of 341,351 participants in total. Two of the studies were assessed to be of low risk of bias, whilst the remaining three had methodological weaknesses. Meta-analysis of the five included studies demonstrated no statistically significant reduction in prostate cancer-specific mortality (RR 0.95, 95% CI 0.85 to 1.07).

Only a preplanned analysis of a 'core' age group of men from the largest study included in this review reported a significant 20% relative reduction in prostate cancer-specific mortality. Among this 'core' group of men aged 55 to 69 the ERSPC authors report that 1410 men would need to be screened to prevent one additional death from prostate cancer during a 9-year period, which is also associated with 48 men needing to be treated for prostate cancer (RR 0.80, 95% CI 0.65 to 0.98). Harms included high rates of false-positive results for the PSA test (up to 75.9%), infection, bleeding, and pain associated with subsequent biopsy.


PSA testing

The Cochrane Collaboration is an international consortium that evaluates medical research

The Big Scare: The Business of Prostate Cancer

Anthony Horan, M.D. attended Dartmouth College and Columbia's College of Physicians and Surgeons. He completed his four year residency in Urology at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center.

This book is a must-read if you have been diagnosed with prostate cancer. Following its advice just might preserve your quality of life--and possibly even save your life. As Dr. Horan so eloquently illustrates, the business of prostate cancer is largely just that--a business and an industry. As The New York Times pointed out in an article recently, this is not only a business, it is big, BIG business. The industry's products range from the $25-a-pop PSA test that can add $10,000 a year in income to a doctor's practice, to the $2500 biopsy, to the $25,000 surgery and/or radiation "options," to the ultimate in prostate cancer treatment--the proton beam generator that is the size of two football fields and costs $100,000 to play. According to the Times article, prostate cancer treatment is one of the two or three things that are leading the way in driving up the cost of health care in the United States right now. Apparently it is completely out of control.

I have read a dozen or so books on prostate cancer and, with the exception of this one, most of them are selling something--one form or another of radical treatment. Celebrity urologists/surgeons/authors (with their celebrity patients) have a lot at stake in preserving the status quo. So do the big university hospitals, the pharmaceutical companies, and the labs that process all those test results. Most of these books downplay the often disastrous side effects of surgery and radiation. But even more dishonestly, what they don't tell you is that more often than not the treatments are entirely unnecessary. As my 90-year-old uncle (and retired doctor) once told me, most men will die WITH prostate but not FROM it. He's known he has prostate cancer for 25 years now and he simply watches it. Same with my 89-year-old father. Both men are still very active.

Prostate

Cochrane Colloboration -- Screening for breast cancer with mammography

The Cochrane Collaboration is an international consortium that evaluates medical research

Screening with mammography uses X-ray to try to find breast cancer before a lump can be felt. The goal is to treat cancer early, when a cure is more likely.
The review includes seven trials that involved 600,000 women who were randomly assigned to receive screening mammograms or not.
The review found that screening for breast cancer likely reduces breast cancer mortality, but the magnitude of the effect is uncertain.

... for every 2000 women invited for screening throughout 10 years:

1 will have her life prolonged
10 healthy women will be diagnosed as breast cancer patients and will be treated unnecessarily
200 women will experience important psychological distress for many months because of false positive findings

Mammography

While these studies are interesting and worth thinking about, particularly when it comes to setting appropriate policy measures such as "how often" and "at what age" should we be screening, there is no doubt whatsoever that screening saves lives. I have diagnosed and treated around 60-70 men with prostate cancer, catching it early through annual screening. EVERY ONE OF THEM had to undergo minimal treatment relatively speaking. Not one of them suffered and not one of them died from either the treatment or the disease.

There were several "false positive" PSA readings and out of my huge practice several men underwent prostate biopsy several times. They were all good sports and not one of them complained.

Likewise every woman I care for who had abnormal mammograms and had to go back either for repeat, or magnified views or needle biopsies EVER complained. Not one of them became distraught over it, as we always immediately got them fully involved with the process, keeping them fully informed, etc. ALL lived. NOT ONE died of metastatic or late disease. Even my outrageously super-duper healthy 83 year old mother had her mammogram for this year in the late spring. It was abnormal. The time to get the extra views, the biopises, the diagnoses, the lumpectomy and lymph node analysis, to a brief course of radiation and the onto some hormone suppression pills was under a month for the entire process. She walked from her apartment to her appointments and it still didn't interfere with her 3 week summer trip to Europe.

Cancer screening saves misery and saves lives. We are doing somewhat better in Colon Cancer screening but folks are still being a bit too haphazard in routine stool occult blood testing and proper use of colonoscopy. If one follows the accepted guidelines you'll do yourself, your friends and your families a big, big, favor.

mm

Last night we are sitting in the living room when my grandson says:
"Hey! That's you on TV."
Last year the TV news crew followed me around as I was screened.
They are replaying it this year.
Thankfully, the doctor shut the door just before the full moon came out.
At least it wasn't the VD screening.

Why haven’t we cured cancer yet?

When President Nixon launched the “war on cancer” 40 years ago, scientists had no idea how difficult it would be

Saturday was the two year anniversary of the death of my mother-in-law from a particularly nasty form of breast cancer, and, even though I am a breast cancer surgeon, I still wonder why there was nothing in the armamentarium of science-based medicine that could save her from a several month decline followed by an unpleasant death.

I close with the same question with which I opened. Why haven’t we cured cancer yet, anyway? Yes, I know it’s a bit of a misleading question, given that we can actually cure quite a few cancers, including several leukemias and lymphomas, which are curable with chemotherapy and radiation, and solid tumors like breast and colorectal cancer which are curable with a combination of surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation.

Why haven’t scientists cured cancer yet? Leaving aside the trite answer of “Which cancer?” I can say this: Because it’s hard. It’s very, very hard. It’s harder than going to the moon; it’s harder than building the nuclear bomb; it’s harder than wiping out smallpox. All of those were, of course, also very, very hard too, but cancer is a harder nut to crack still. It’s hundreds, perhaps thousands, of diseases. Each type of cancer can be many, even dozens, of different diseases in itself. Each tumor can be many diseases that are constantly evolving, both in response to the environment in which the cancer cells grow and to treatments that are thrown at them.

sciencebasedmedicine

Does chemotherapy work?

What needs to be understood is that chemotherapy is very good for some things.

For instance, it's very good for treating and curing leukemias and lymphomas. For certain cancers, such as breast and colorectal cancer, it's very good at decreasing the chance of relapse after curative surgery. When given before curative surgery, chemotherapy can also make organ-preserving surgery possible.

chemotherapy usually does little for pancreatic cancer, and metastatic melanoma laughs at most chemotherapy (although, fortunately there are newer agents coming into use that provide hope that this will no longer be the case). For all its uses and advantages in various clinical situations, in other situations chemotherapy doesn't work well. For example, chemotherapy alone is not very good at prolonging survival in advanced epithelial malignancies, and it's not at all unreasonable to ask whether oncologist, for whatever reason, overuse it in such patients, who are, for the most part, currently incurable.

buried in that median are "outliers" who derive a huge survival benefit from the chemotherapy and survive many more months than expected, sometimes many more years than expected. Moreover, it does patients no favor to try to use the observation that chemotherapy has at best relatively modest benefits in patients with advanced epithelial malignancies to try to imply that chemotherapy doesn't work for all patients. In particular, patients have to remember that just because chemotherapy doesn't do that well against advanced malignancies does not, as the quacks would have you believe, imply that "alternative medicine" can do better.

Chemo

Panel Faults Prostate-Cancer Test

The US Preventive Services Task Force will recommend a "D" rating for prostate specific antigen, or PSA, testing.
A "D" rating means "there is moderate or high certainty that the service has no net benefit or that the harms outweigh the benefits," according to the group's website. It also is a recommendation to "discourage use" of test or treatment.
The task force is an influential group whose recommendations can influence coverage decisions by the federal Medicare program and other insurers.

The same group determined that mammograms may not be needed until women reach age 50.
The American Cancer Society voiced its displeasure with the new recommendations. "The task force is essentially telling women that mammography at age 40 to 49 saves lives; just not enough of them," Otis Brawley, the society's chief medical officer, said in a statement. About 17% of breast cancer deaths occurred in women who were diagnosed in their 40s, he said.
But a report in last month's Journal of the American Medical Association found that mammograms often miss very aggressive cancers that develop between screenings, while finding slow-growing tumors that may not pose a threat
http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2009-1...gram17_ST_N.htm

“Unfortunately, the evidence now shows that this test does not save men’s lives,” said Dr. Virginia Moyer, a professor of pediatrics at Baylor College of Medicine and chairwoman of the task force. “This test cannot tell the difference between cancers that will and will not affect a man during his natural lifetime.

the devastating consequences of the biopsies and treatments that often flow from the test have become increasingly apparent.

From 1986 through 2005, one million men received surgery, radiation therapy or both who would not have been treated without a P.S.A. test

at least 5,000 died soon after surgery
10,000 to 70,000 suffered serious complications
Half had persistent blood in their semen
200,000 to 300,000 suffered impotence, incontinence or both.

prostate

Steve Jobs' trust in alternative medicine likely shortened his life, researcher contends

According to a 2008 Fortune article, Jobs for nine months pursued "alternative methods to treat his pancreatic cancer, hoping to avoid [an] operation through a special diet." The Buddhist vegetarian took this approach from the time he was diagnosed in October 2003 until at least the end of July 2004, when he underwent surgery at Stanford University Medical Center.


The condition might have been nipped in the bud if Jobs had acted right away. Jobs's cancer manifest in neuroendocrine tumors, which are typically far less lethal than the "pancreatic adenocarcinoma" that make up 95 percent of pancreatic cancer cases. Amri said neuroendocrine tumors are so "mild" that...

"In my series of patients, for many subtypes, the survival rate was as high as 100% over a decade...


Jobs

Misdiagnosed with aggressive stomach cancer

Man told he has stomach cancer
Doctors remove 80 per cent of stomach
Tests show he never had cancer

"After independent pathological review the biopsies taken during the gastroscopy, the biopsy findings were wrong in that there was never any evidence of malignancy," the claim says.

Maurice Blackburn lawyer Anna Walsh said Mr Lord received an apology from the pathologist who originally reported on his tissue samples after Central Coast Local Health District had investigated the alleged incident.


Read more: http://www.news.com.au/national/graham-lor...9#ixzz1dak5psEU

Argentina's President Fernandez sent home, never had cancer

Argentine President Cristina Fernandez never had cancer despite being diagnosed with the disease last month and having her thyroid gland removed on January 4, her spokesman said on Saturday.

The operation to remove the gland went well, but when it was later analyzed it turned out to have never contained cancerous cells, said spokesman Alfredo Scoccimaro.


cancer

Expert branded a "woman hater" for saying breast cancer screening ruins lives

‘It is a biological fact of life that we cannot avoid getting cancer as we get older,’ says Professor Gotzsche.

‘It’s so common nearly all middle-aged people will have some sign of it and most of them will die without having had any symptoms as a result.’

In other words, scanning finds cancerous changes that would otherwise never have caused a problem in your lifetime.

But once a mammogram picks up something that might be a tumour, you’re on your way to becoming a cancer patient because there are no reliable ways of telling if you’ve got the slow-growing or disappearing type, or if it is going to become dangerously invasive.

You will be sent for a biopsy and, if it’s cancerous, you get the full cancer works — surgery, chemotherapy and radiation, and possibly have your breast removed.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-...l#ixzz1qKBh7SJ2

Doctors call for end to five cancer tests, treatments

As much as 30 percent of health-care spending goes to procedures, tests, and hospital stays that do not improve a patient's health, according to a 2008 analysis by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget office.

Although the task force emphasized that its recommendations -- winnowed from about 10 suggestions by oncologists -- were driven by medical considerations, the report makes clear that expense was a major factor. A number of cancer drugs cost nearly $100,000 but extend life a few months or not at all. Widely-used imaging tests cost up to $5,000 yet do not benefit patients.

ASCO recommends against routine use of four other procedures: chemotherapy for patients with advanced cancers who are unlikely to benefit; advanced imaging technologies such as CT and PET or bone scans to determine the precise stage of both early breast and prostate cancers at low risk for metastasis; and drugs to stimulate white blood cell production in patients receiving chemotherapy if they have a risk of febrile neutropenia, an often-fatal condition marked by fever and abnormally low numbers of certain white blood cells.

The supporting evidence for each recommendation is expected to surprise patients and even some physicians, since these very widely-used tests and treatments have little or no scientific basis, said Schnipper.

One recommendation likely to stir controversy, and even revive charges of "death panels," is to not use chemotherapy and other treatments in patients with advanced solid-tumor cancers such as colorectal or lung who are in poor health and did not benefit from previous chemo.

Such treatment is widespread. At one large health maintenance organization, for instance, 49 percent of patients with a common form of lung cancer but with poor "performance status" (they were largely confined to a bed or chair and capable of only limited self-care) received chemo. Research shows, however, that it is unlikely to extend their life or improve its quality.


http://news.yahoo.com/doctors-call-end-fiv...-041258011.html

Sexually Transmitted HPV Virus Now a More Common Cause of Throat and Oral Cancer Than Tobacco

According to a January report from the American Cancer Society, which found a rise in oral cancer caused by HPV in both women and men. As the report said, as of 2004, 72 percent of oral cancer tumors were HPV-positive -- up from 16 percent of tumors in data collected between 1984 and 1989.

Previously, excessive drinking and tobacco use were the most common causes of the throat cancer, but HPV has replaced tobacco as the leading cause of throat cancers. HPV's rise as the leading cause of oral cancer is not just the result of growing rates of the virus -- it is also explained by drops in smoking, thanks to public health campaigns that describe the dangers of cigarette use.

Despite the growing rates of oral cancer, cases are still relatively rare, with about 7,100 new cases each year, reported USA Today. But that doesn't mean oral HPV infection is rare: According to a 2012 study of Americans, aged 14 to 69, about 10 percent of men and 3.6 percent of women currently have an oral HPV infection.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/03/m..._n_3377980.html

So I guess now I'll have to quit smoking too?

Sorry,
My picture of Monica Lewinsky smoking a cigar disappeared.