The Government's War Against Men's Health Is About to Get Much Worse

Article here. Excerpt:

'The Centers of Medicare and Medicaid services (CMS) is proposing using PSA screening as a quality metric for payments to providers. If enacted, your primary care physician will be monetized to not screen you for prostate cancer. This is an inevitable downstream effect of the largely discredited and intellectually lazy United States Preventive Task Force Recommendation (USPSTF) Grade D against screening for prostate cancer. That should scare you. That should scare everyone who loves men.

Prepare for the rates of metastatic prostate cancer to rise. The effect of widespread PSA screening in the 1980s was the immediate and rapid decrease in metastatic prostate cancer cases — the same cannot be said of screening for breast cancer (which has a Grade B recommendation). Intellectual consistency is not the USPSTF forte.
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PSA screening has not been all sunshine and roses with a cup of tea on the side. The over-treating and over diagnosing of patients with low-risk prostate cancer has been appalling and self-defeating. I have been outspoken in my abhorrence of PSA screening at health fairs and its inappropriate advocacy by the NFL; as if promoting prostate cancer screening absolves its own misguided misogyny (ditto the bizarro Pink campaign).

Urologists have made important gains in active surveillance of prostate cancer (observing select low-grade disease). A recent analysis by Drs. Cooperberg and Carroll in JAMA outlines the increase use of active surveillance in low risk patients from 10% in 2009 to a current rate of 40% — a dramatic increase never seen before. In many countries, such as Australia, the active surveillance rates for low-risk prostate cancer are in the 90% range. That is where the United States should be and can be.'

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