Ads urge men of a certain age to get screened for prostate cancer. But is "test early, test often" the best approach? Otis Brawley of the American Cancer Society and Mark Scholz, author of Invasion Of The Prostate Snatchers, discuss other approaches.Download the podcast here. See also: The Decision: Your prostate biopsy shows cancer. Now what?: Medical insight, personal stories, and humor by a urologist who has been where you are now.
, Johns Hopkins Patients' Guide to Prostate Cancer (The Johns Hopkins Patients' Guide)
, Surviving Prostate Cancer Without Surgery
, Prostate Cancer Survivors Speak Their Minds: Advice on Options, Treatments, and Aftereffects
In "There Will Be Blood Pricks: Diabetes has forced me to become a self-tracker, and I can't stand it", Hanna Rosin at the Slate.com writes about the book:
I gravitate toward medical stories such as the one told by Mark Scholz in his recent book Invasion of the Prostate Snatchers. The screening test for prostate cancer, by quantifying a certain cancer indicator in the blood, has caused thousands of men—my father among them—to have operations they probably did not need. The test was effective at detecting cancer, but it could not distinguish between the lethal kind and the benign kind that grows slowly over time and never does any harm. The test, it turns out, was answering only half the question. In the face of a frightening disease, numbers can be very soothing. But they sometimes obscure what you really need to know. Something like this is also happening with diabetes.And at that, there comes to mind a pairing. The other day, we blogged about "Wrong." The book and author's main thesis is that you can't trust in these studies and metrics blindly; you have to move forward with skepticism. And of course, there's The Emperor of All Maladies, which fashions itself as "biography" of cancer.
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