Sounds like you still have the old style plan, lp -- most of us have been having these novel daily checkups with that new guy and I don't think he's ever seen the inside of a medical school before.
How about that, huh? A campaign slogan hiding a party philosophy disguised as a wellness exam.
-- Edited by catahoula on Monday 18th of June 2012 01:55:43 PM
-- Edited by catahoula on Monday 18th of June 2012 01:56:56 PM
-- Edited by catahoula on Monday 18th of June 2012 01:57:52 PM
Men should not get routinely screened for prostate cancer using the PSA test, a government panel recommends. The panel finds there is little evidence that testing for PSA, or prostate-specific antigen, saves men’s lives, and that it causes too much unnecessary harm from the treatment of tumors that would never have killed them … The panel concluded that the benefit of screening was outweighed by the potential risks, which include pain, fever, bleeding, infection and problems urinating, resulting from biopsies as well as incontinence and impotence associated with the treatment of tumors that would not have otherwise caused harm. Each year, about 1,000 to 1,300 men die from complications associated with treatments prompted by PSA screening.
This is unspeakably asinine.
The logic that leads to this recommendation would also lead to the conclusion that it is wrong to yell “Fire!” in a theater that is filling with smoke because of the “potential risks” of the rush for the exits.
The problem is not with the warning that the PSA test, or yelling “Fire!” provides. The problem is with the overreaction to it.
Apparently the medical community would rather stick its head in the sand and be happily oblivious that there might be a fire, or cancer, than address the "potential risks" of how they react to it.
Here’s what I can say with 100% statistical certainty. If I had followed the panel's recommendations I'd be dead today. If not for a PSA test at age 48 prostate cancer would have killed me by now.
And even at that it was almost too late. It had been five years since my previous test. If I’d been tested more frequently the cancer might have been caught earlier and I probably would not have had to undergo the extreme measures of surgery AND radiation treatments.
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It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.” – Mark Twain
