Why you should put off prostate treatment
Give any of my “wacky” ideas enough time, and mainstream medicine eventually sees things my way. My stance on prostate cancer and the Prostate Specific Antigen (PSA) screening is no different. A new study has found that men with early-stage prostate cancer actually aren’t at a big risk if they choose to take a wait-and-see approach to treatment rather than going immediately under the knife.
Yes!
In a study of over 9,000 men who opted to put off treatment for prostate cancer (or skip it entirely), only 10 percent of them had died of the cancer 10 years later. In fact, most of the men were living with the disease without significantly worse symptoms. Even the 30 percent of the men who chose to eventually undergo treatment were able to put it off for an average of 11 years.
This latest study is just more proof that the medical community is moving too quickly in reaction to the suspect results of PSA tests. Prostate cancer is the most common cancer in men, with an average of 220,000 cases diagnosed each year. But most prostate cancer tumors grow so slowly that they never threaten the lives of the men they afflict. Natural causes will kill those men long before the tumors have the chance. And the reality is, if you have a fast-growing tumor, you’re doomed anyway.
I’ve long had issue with the supposedly life-saving PSA screening. This popular blood test has been the standard method of discovering early-stage cancerous tumors in the prostate since the 1990s. But it’s useless as a diagnostic tool.
Because PSA readings can vary dramatically from test to test in the same person, the odds of a “false positive” are alarmingly high. And yet each year, thousands of men undergo intrusive, debilitating, and potentially unnecessary prostate surgery on the basis of PSA results – a fact that’s especially devastating when you realize that the surgery is largely unnecessary even when a man does have prostate cancer.
When it comes right down to it, putting off treatment of prostate cancer is the way to go-especially for older men.
Hopefully, this latest study will help undercut what I see as the biggest and most immediate threat to men suffering from prostate cancer: the PSA test. There’s no way to make this inaccurate test go away. But if, at the very least, doctors can be more circumspect with the treatment of patients who get “positive” PSA results, it can cut down on the number of men uselessly subjected to the horrific effects of prostate surgery.
Dengue fever to spread through the U.S.
Some health officials believe that we’re on the verge of an outbreak of dengue fever, a tropical infection that causes flu-like symptoms and can be deadly if it’s left untreated. The mosquito-borne illness has already been reported in Texas.
A report published in the Journal of the American Medical Association said that “worldwide, dengue is among the most important reemerging infectious diseases, with an estimated 50 to 100 million annual cases, 500,000 hospitalizations and, by World Health Organization estimates, 22,000 deaths, mostly in children.”
This is bad, but keep in mind that these cases occur mostly in third world countries, where access to medical care and antibiotics is often limited. And whereas I’m always concerned about foreign diseases making their way into our society where they can afflict our weakest citizens, I doubt that dengue fever could ever reach the proportions that would make it a serious health risk here.
So why all the alarmist rhetoric? Because it adds more fuel to the global warming fire. You see, health officials aren’t just blaming poor mosquito control for the spread of this disease-they’re also blaming global warming.
The irony of it all is that the most effective forms of mosquito control here in the U.S. are hampered by the very same people who are quick to lay the blame on “global warming” for making climates worldwide more tropical. The enviro-Nazis want to do their best to save “wetlands” (a fancy word for swamps), yet it’s in the stagnant waters of these bogs that disease-carrying mosquitoes thrive.
To truly put a stop to the potential dangers of the spread of dengue fever, an effective program would require much more than most environmentalists (or citizens, or government officials, or city planners) would be willing to tolerate, like the elimination of ALL stagnant pools in towns and cities, including automobile tires and other receptacles that are favorite breeding grounds for mosquitoes. And of course, you’d need to drain all of the wetlands within a few miles of population centers (mosquitoes do not migrate far from home) and to use copious amounts of DDT. Can you imagine measures of this sort ever being enacted?
Of course not. And while the threat of dengue fever may be real, it’s doubtful that it could ever reach the proportions that would make it a serious health risk here in the U.S. So you’ll forgive me if I ignore the alarmist rhetoric and concentrate on the more important medical issues at hand. In the meantime, I’ll still be attending summer cookouts without diving for cover every time I hear a buzzing near my ears.
