| George Conklin 2004-10-04, 2:21 am |
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"Richard" <owl801@aol.com> wrote in message
news:94e3b286.0409280508.6a99b6e8@posting.google.com...
> Yes, it certainly seems that it may be possible to have a very small,
> and perhaps even a very slowly growing, area of prostate cancer most
> of your life, dying of something else in old age without ever knowing
> you had it.
>
> The trick seems to be to distinguish that kind of cancer - which the
> doctors like to call 'indolent' (lazy cancer - hmm!) - from the more
> aggressive kind which would be very likely to kill you before anything
> else did. That is where I think PSA, with all its weaknesses, can be
> useful as *one* pointer.
According to the article, PSA predicts almost not at all right now. That
is what was written. Once an excuse to biopsy is found, the cancer is going
to emerge, 100% at age 80+, maybe only 8% in your 20s. But it is the same
process. But which of these cancers will progress cannot be determined at
the present time by traditional methods.
>
> At this stage of knowledge, I'd accept it could just possibly be true
> that no current PCa treatment lengthens life at all - the statistics
> seem to be very slippery and hard to pin down!
It is really distressing that after 100 years of surgery, we are only now
trying to do the evaluations. If the results were going to be clear, they
would have emerged after 10 years. Maybe something will show up in 15. Who
knows.
But to make that
> statement would be to say (for example) that not even one man who has
> cancer within the capsule entirely removed and has no recurrence would
> otherwise have gone on to develop metastases and die within a few
> years of being diagnosed with the disease.
Unknown really.
It would also mean that
> every single person who lives for years with hormone blockade would
> have lived just as long if no steps at all had been taken to slow the
> progress of the disease.
The article did not address this.
Both those things are *possible* (aspects of
> medical practice have been found to be misconceived in the past), but
> at this point I don't feel either seems very likely.
>
> We can hope that there will soon be better ways of identifying the
> presence of prostate cancer, and establishing what level of threat
> each case poses. We may also soon find less traumatic ways of dealing
> with the threat if it is there. For the moment, though, I guess
> everyone has to find their own path through this particular minefield.
> The strategy I mentioned in my previous posting is my own best guess
> at a sensible path to follow, after thinking about it quite a lot; but
> there's certainly plenty of scope for discussion.
>
> Richard Slessor
The tragedy is that the science is not done but billions of $$ are spent
each year on application of techniques based on faith.
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