Dedicated to Chief Patrick Enebeli Peter Ogwuazor, my classmate from 52 years ago, we entered college on Saturday, January 19, 1967, who recently succumbed to this terrible disease!
[pull_quote_center]Prologue: “Medicine is an ART built on CONJECTURE and IMPROVED by MURDER” – Lord Charlise, OBE.[/pull_quote_center]
Subject: Prostate Cancer Deaths
Some Facts.
This paper will show comprehensively that “doing nothing” about Prostate Cancer saves enormously more lives than treating the disease!
Yes, experts have long established that each level of prostate intervention is not only wrong – headed, but also programs the patients for unneeded side effects, extreme misery, and avoidable deaths.
Interventions!! What are they?
There are three(3) of them:
1. Prostate PSA Blood Screening.
ii. Prostate Biopsy(through the Rectum!)
iii. Prostate Treatments — Sundry drugs, Chemotherapy, Radiation, Surgery.
By Whose authority do we say this?
Let’s tune to some unimpeachable sources.(Excerpts only!)
Source No 1. Dr Joseph Mercola,MD.
He starts with how USA Banned all PSA Tests in 2012!
This is how he reported it on June 23, 2012. …
” In a startling reversal of years of pressing healthy and symptom-free men to get routine PSA prostate tests, U.S. health officials now say these tests do more harm than good.
What’s more, the United States Preventive Services Task Force, USPSTF, said they aren’t recommending the tests for men of any age.
The task force is basing its new stance on research that shows that only zero to one out of every 1,000 men who are screened would actually benefit from the exam, while many others would suffer from the side effects of unnecessary treatments, ranging from impotence to death.
… The prostate-specific antigen test (PSA test), analyzes your blood for prostate-specific antigen (PSA), a substance produced by your prostate gland. When higher-than-normal levels of PSA are detected, it is believed that cancer may be present, even though other factors, such as age or enlarged prostate, can also cause elevated levels. A biopsy is often recommended at that time to determine whether cancer is, in fact, present.
…after reviewing published research to measure the benefits and harms of screening for prostate cancer with PSA testing, they gave the test a “D” rating, meaning that “there is moderate or high certainty that the service has no net benefit or that the harms outweigh the benefits.”
They wrote: “For men of any age, the USPSTF recommends that doctors and patients do not screen for prostate cancer because the potential benefits do not outweigh the harms.
…Many experts agree that PSA testing is unreliable at best and useless at worst for accurately diagnosing prostate cancer, because PSA levels fluctuate for a variety of reasons, one being age, which causes PSA levels to rise.
According to the National Cancer Institute:” … there is no specific normal or abnormal PSA level. In addition, various factors, such as inflammation (e.g., prostatitis), can cause a man’s PSA level to fluctuate. It is also common for PSA values to vary somewhat from laboratory to laboratory.
Consequently, one abnormal PSA test result does not necessarily indicate the need for a prostate biopsy.”
On Deaths from Unnecessary Treatments!, Dr Mercola continues,:
“… A Damning Reuters report:
If a biopsy finds seemingly malignant cells, as happens to 120 in 1,000 screened men,…
* about 90 percent of men opt for surgery, radiation or hormone-deprivation therapy.
* Up to five men in 1,000 opting for surgery will die within a month of the operation;
* 10 to 70 more will have serious cardiovascular complications such as a stroke or heart attack.
* After radiotherapy and surgery, 200 to 300 of 1,000 men suffer incontinence, impotence or both.
* Hormone-deprivation therapy causes erectile dysfunction in about 400 of 1,000 men.”
On Why USPSTF banned all PSA Tests.
“… You still might be wondering why the USPSTF would want to do away with PSA testing, given that prostate cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer among U.S. men (other than skin cancer).
The answer is two-fold.
* First, as mentioned above, the false positive rate is high, which means many men go through biopsies unnecessarily.
* Second, many prostate cancers end up causing no problems to the patient, who may have never even known it was there, if not for the screening.
….USPSTF reported:”Good evidence shows that PSA-based screening can cause harm, including pain and complications from prostate biopsy and worry about test results. ..”
On Worthless/Dangerous Treatment,.
“… However, the more worrisome harms are related to treatment of prostate cancers found by screening when most of these cancers, if not detected by screening, would never have caused problems for the patient.
The side effects of prostate cancer treatments include sexual dysfunction, bowel and bladder incontinence, and even death.”
In other words, men end up getting highly toxic, dangerous treatments for a disease that probably would never have harmed them (PSA tests cannot distinguish between slow-growing and fast-growing prostate cancer)…..
On Prostate Surgery and High Mortality.
“.. The mortality rate during or shortly after prostate surgery is estimated to be 1 in 200, according to a study published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
We also don’t hear much from the men who are suffering from incontinence, impotence, or both, the devastatingly common side effects of treatment….”
II. Source Number Two: Dr. John Horgan, writing on, “Why I Won’t Get a PSA Test for Prostate Cancer”,
He tells us:
*”… Physicians are still recommending the blood test for prostate cancer even though it harms far more men than it helps
* If you get a PSA test for prostate cancer you are 80-40 times more likely to get unnecessary surgery or radiation than you are to have your life saved, according to the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force.
* PSA stands for prostate-specific antigen, an enzyme produced by the prostate gland, which is located below the male bladder. The test, which was developed in the 1980s, looks for elevated PSA levels, which can indicate cancerous cells in the prostate gland.
* The problem is that inflammation and other problems unrelated to cancer can also elevate PSA levels.
And when the PSA test correctly detects cancer, it is often so slow-growing that it would never have caused death or even impairment of health. Detection of these non-deadly cancers is called overdiagnosis…
On Outright Ban for PSA in 2012!
*”… In 2012, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, a federally funded panel of experts, recommended against the PSA test, saying the cons outweighed the pros. The decision was based primarily on data from two large studies, one done in the U.S., which found that screening did not reduce mortality,….
On 2017 “Codicil”.
After staying in business wilderness for a good five years, the Urologists and other medical ” trade unions” whose entire life revolved around prostate treatments, cranked open a chimney in the spring of 2017; they got a weak “Codicil”, namely:
The USPSTF task force, while still not recommending the PSA test,now says that physicians should discuss its “potential benefits and harms” with men 55-69 years old.
The task force still found no benefit for younger or older men, and so still maintained a tight ban on those age groups.
On Multiple Misdiagnosis.
*”… Just to be clear: you are 240-120 times more likely to misdiagnosed as a result of a positive PSA test and 80-40 times more likely to get unnecessary surgery or radiation than you are to have your life saved.
These data are based on this draft document of the task force.
* The task force analysis is even more favorable to the PSA test than a 2013 study by Cochrane Group, an international collaboration that provides impartial assessments of medical procedures.
The group carried out a meta-analysis of five major studies of the PSA test, including the U.S. and European trials examined by the U.S. task force.
The combined data showed “no significant reduction in prostate cancer-specific and overall mortality.”
RELATED: One of the popular treatments for prostate cancer is the taxane therapy.
On PSA “Industry”!.
* The American Academy of Family Physicians recommends against routine PSA screening, but many physicians continue to promote them. To understand why, read the important new book “An American Sickness”, by Dr Elisabeth Rosenthal, which reveals how greed has corrupted health care.
Rosenthal, who got her M.D. before becoming a medical journalist, notes that the PSA test has created a “huge industry for testing and surgery…
On Biopsy. A Painful Error,!
Horrible, Worthless Biopsy!
* “… Digital rectal exams were also found to be ineffective.
The report added: “Harms associated with PSA-based screening and subsequent diagnostic evaluations are frequent, and moderate in severity… Common major harms include overdiagnosis and overtreatment, including infection, blood loss requiring transfusion, pneumonia, erectile dysfunction, and incontinence….”
III. Source Number Three. Prof.Steven Salzberg. In a piece he titled “You Don’t Want That PSA Test For Prostate Cancer”, he said:
* “… I learned a new word this week: pseudoepidemic. That’s what happens when people start looking really hard for a disease that didn’t get much attention earlier, and then–not surprisingly–the disease suddenly becomes much more prevalent.
* This is precisely what happened with prostate cancer in the early 1990s, just after screening tests for prostate-specific antigen, PSA, became widely available. As explained by NIH’s Paul Pinsky and colleagues in an article in the New England Journal of Medicine this week, prostate cancer rates rose from 135 (cases per year, per 100,000 men) in 1988 to 220 in 1992, a 63% increase in just four years.
Rates slowly dropped after that, but they remained above 150 through 2009.
* No one believes that this increase represented an actual increase in the rate of prostate cancer. Instead, it was an increase in the rate of diagnosis, made possible by the PSA test. After this simple blood test became available, millions of men started getting routine PSA testing. The idea was that, because prostate cancer increases the levels of PSA in the blood, this test could detect cancer early, which in turn would save lives.
* It hasn’t worked out that way. The problem is that, as a large body of evidence has now shown, most prostate cancers are slow-growing, “indolent” tumors that don’t kill you, at least not before something else does.
* What’s worse is that the treatments for prostate cancer have very serious, life-altering side effects. 20-30% of men treated with surgery and radiation suffer from long-term incontinence, erectile dysfunction or both.
* This is especially problematic given that the false-positive rate of PSA testing is as high as 80%. In other words, if your doctor tells you that your test was positive, there’s an 80% chance that you don’t have cancer. ….
* But how about the benefits of early detection? Alas, they did not materialize. Very large trials (including the PLCO study, with over 75,000 participants) showed that routine PSA screening did not prevent any deaths….
* Putting all these facts together, the U.S. Preventative Services Task Force, in 2012, concluded that the harms of PSA testing substantially outweigh the benefits, and it recommends, bluntly:
“Do not use prostate-specific antigen, PSA,-based screening for prostate cancer”
The American Academy of Family Physicians agrees, stating:
“.. There is convincing evidence that PSA-based screening leads to substantial over-diagnosis of prostate tumors. Many tumors will not harm patients, while the risks of treatment are significant. …
* Even the American Urological Association, which strongly opposed the USPSTF recommendation when it first appeared, now recommends against PSA screening except in one age group, men 55-69 years old.
The AUA, though, is highly biased in favor of testing, because its members make significant income from PSA tests and the subsequent follow-ups….”
IV. Sorceress Number Four: Prof.Richard J. Ablin, PhD, who discovered PSA in 1970, but believes the test which was developed from his discovery may cause unintended problems that men and their families need to know about.
Hear him:
* “The test is hardly more effective than a coin toss,… As I’ve been trying to make clear for many years now, PSA testing can’t detect prostate cancer …and, more important, it can’t distinguish between the two types of prostate cancer …The test simply reveals how much of the prostate antigen a man has in his blood.
Infections, over-the-counter drugs like ibuprofen, and benign swelling of the prostate can all elevate a man’s PSA levels, but none of these factors signals cancer.
Men with low readings might still harbor dangerous cancers, while those with high readings might be completely healthy…
* I’ve found, personally, that the problem with the PSA test is that there are too many “false positives.” That means the score indicates there may be a problem when there actually isn’t one…
* …. 30 million American men are tested every year at a cost of at least $3 billion.
* … the medical community must “stop the inappropriate use of P.S.A. screening. Doing so would save billions of dollars and rescue millions of men from unnecessary, debilitating treatments”.
.* . All men and their families need to know that every year, more than a million men undergo painful needle biopsies for prostate cancer, and upward of 100,000 have radical prostatectomies, which can result in incontinence and impotence.
But the shocking fact is that most of these men would never have died from this common form of cancer, which frequently grows so slowly that it never even leaves the prostate.
This is another example of the “cure” being worse than the “disease…
How did we get to a point where so many unnecessary tests and surgeries are being done?”…
All these from Prof. Ablin’s great book, ‘The Great Prostate Hoax: How Big Medicine Hijacked the PSA Test and Caused a Public Health Disaster‘.
End of Discussion!
* Last Line: ” Prostate cancer is a very serious disease among older men….one out of 16 men(about 6%) will receive a diagnosis of prostate cancer in their lifetimes, although only 2.9% will die of it, most of them older than 75.”-The American College of Physicians.
My Interpretation: So, it appears that if Chief Patrick Enebeli Peter Ogwuazor has done 100% NOTHING about curing his Prostate Cancer, he could possibly have attained 75 years, and, maybe, even, died just WITH cancer – never KILLED by it.
Prince Patrick died aged only 64!
Epilogue: “Medicine is the ART of AMUSING the Patient while NATURE does the HEALING” – Voltaire.
Ignatius O. Onah, is a Pharmacist , Nutritionist, and Naturopathic Doctor, you could him on Email Here.
The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author.
