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medpundit |
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Friday, June 20, 2003The European medical community looks for thousand excuses not to treat prostate cancer. Why don’t they just admit that they do not have the money for life saving operations on men over 65? If they stopped doing all these "Don't treat prostate cancer" studies, they might have some money left to treat the disease. The fact is that the PSA will find all cases of prostate cancer. The only way to prove that a high PSA is wrong is to do nothing. Then you have a 50% chance of dieing of cancer. I refuse to die of prostate cancer. I don’t care what those Europeans say. It isn’t just the Europeans who question the value of prostate cancer screening.The problem is, although about 4,000 men in the U.S. die each year from prostate cancer, most men with prostate cancer don’t die from it: Although data from autopsies indicate that approximately 70 percent of 80-year-old men have prostate cancer, this malignancy is the cause of death in only 3 percent of all men. Prostate cancer is often an incidental finding in elderly patients. The tumor grows so slowly that no symptoms appear; in essence, patients often die of other causes before the cancer causes serious problems. And the cost of that screening? Although an individual PSA test is relatively inexpensive ($20 to $40), expenses multiply when a patient with an abnormal PSA test must be evaluated. Transrectal ultrasound examination costs approximately $100 per patient, and random biopsies cost another $150. Pathologic evaluation of the biopsy specimens costs approximately $300 per patient. When compounded by the fact that three patients without cancer must be evaluated for each cancer that is detected, the estimated overall cost of initiating a nationwide prostate cancer screening and treatment program for all eligible men ranges from $8.5 to $25.7 billion per year. So, if the Europeans are squeamish about spending money on a screening program that doesn’t actually save lives, that’s understandable. Those billions of dollars spent on prostate screening - especially in Europe where healthcare is paid for by the government (i.e. by the people through taxes) - means billions of dollars unavailable for other things. In the United States, it translates into higher health insurance premiums, as well as higher Medicare spending. You could argue that it’s a significant contribution to the deficit as well as to our healthcare insurance woes. And the European study isn't the first to suggest that the end result of widespread prostate cancer screening is to find lots of asymptomatic cancers that never would have caused harm. There are many others. posted by Sydney on 6/20/2003 06:57:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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