Prostate Cancer Diagnosis and Treatment — Good Medicine or Business as Usual?

This is a follow-up to a post I wrote called, "PSA Testing: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly".   http://prostatecancerblog.net/wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&post=2120.  Please read that before you read this. Dr. Richard Ablin, father of the PSA test, argued in a New York Times op-ed piece recently that the widespread, routine use of the test to screen for prostate cancer [...]

By |2021-07-19T10:59:52-04:00March 31st, 2010|Postings|21 Comments

The Language of Cancer

I just saw that Dana Jennings, who writes a blog about his prostate cancer for the NYT, is discussing language and cancer.  So I recycled this essay I wrote some time back. It amazes me that doctors still use the word biochemical failure to refer to a recurrence of prostate cancer.  A doctor told me, [...]

By |2017-10-19T10:54:07-04:00March 17th, 2010|Postings|2 Comments

PSA Testing: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

A story about prostate cancer (PC) screening titled "The Great Prostate Mistake" which appeared in the New York Times last week, "went viral".  Everybody's talking about it.  (See http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/10/opinion/10Ablin.html?scp=1&sq=ablin&st=cse)   I refer to an opinion piece written by Dr. Richard Ablin, a researcher in immunobiology and pathology who invented the prostate-specific antigen (PSA) test in 1970, the most commonly used [...]

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