The proper role and scope of government

[SamIam]

First of all, these are opinion pieces - one published in a newspaper and the other in the business magazine, Forbes.

I do not trust medical (or scientific) information from such sources. Is the Winona Daily News a peer reviewed journal? And who is Dr. Frank Bures? A renowned cancer researcher? The senior oncologist at the Mayo clinic? The local chiropractor who picks up spare change writing for the Winona Daily News? Or maybe the local GP who picks up quite a bit of loose change pandering to the fear of cancer.

Who knows?

I don't and the last thing I'd do is make major health decisions based on what I read in the News, earnest journalists though they may be.

Then we have Forbes, dedicated to business and those who run businesses - NOT a medical journal. As a matter of fact, Forbes has a vested interest in attacking government regulation of ANY sort, even including health guidelines. Steve Forbes gives us his anecdotal experience without mentioning his age - which is a major factor for prostrate cancer - and makes the assumption that every man in the world will share the same experience as he did.

Whatever

This is the research done at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) published in the highly regarded, peer-reviewed Journal of New England Medicine:

~snip~

At seven years, 50 deaths were attributable to prostate cancer in the screening group and 44 deaths were attributable in the usual-care group. Through year 10, there were 92 prostate cancer deaths in the screening group and 82 in the usual-care group. The difference between the numbers of deaths in the two groups was not statistically significant. Thus there was no detectable mortality benefit for screening vs. usual-care.

Given the uncertainties about the mortality benefits of PSA testing, NCI has been pursuing many avenues to find new ways of screening for prostate cancer, including several sets of biomarkers that are being validated in its Early Detection Research Network (EDRN), some using specimens from PLCO’s biorepository of tissue and blood. Some examples of the marker tests include using microstrands of RNA to detect disease, examining changes in genes such as GSTP1, and imaging of proteins in prostate cancer tissue.

This testing was part of a 17 year on-going study and included a subject pool of 76,693 men. Compared with the Steve Forbes study of one man - himself.

The NIH is working on developing a better test in order to save lives. The old test is just not all that helpful. Sorry, Frank