What to do with the diagnosis of Biden – Thage

By Dhruv Khullar

Khullar is a practicing doctor and writes of medicine, health care and politics for the New Yorker.

On Sunday, Joe Biden has revealed that he has an aggressive form of prostate cancer that has spread to the bone, which means that it can be managed but not cared for.

The news almost coincided with the promotion of a book whose authors argue that its internal circle has committed itself in a bad direction, if not clouding, on its mental acuity towards the end of its mandate.

The sympathy quickly gave way to speculation about what Biden had known about his cancer and when he had known him. Donald Trump said he feels “very badly”, but that “people should try to find out what happened” and that “someone is not saying the facts”.

Prostate cancer, who kills more men than all other tumors, can be diagnosed with rapid blood test for a biomarker called specific prostate antigen. Many observers were perplexed by the fact that a eighty-two years old man with practically unlimited access to medical treatment for whose health there was practically unlimited conjectures-could not be diagnosed until cancer has threatened his life.

Is it reasonable to ask, shouldn’t all men be tested for any eventuality? “You must be your best lawyer,” Ana Navarro told spectators, a political strategist who hosts the ABC “The View”, the spectators in response to Biden’s news. “If you have more than seventy and they are telling you:” No necessary psa “, request a psa, take a point.”

But not all cancer tests are simple. Some men who develop prostate cancer take PSA tests and have normal results. Many men with high levels do not have cancer, or have a slow cancer that is of little concern. (About one in eight is diagnosed with prostate carcinoma; according to some estimates, most men over the age of eighty years have some cancer cells in their prostate.)

Too many medical information has its damage. In a piece of 2015 for this magazine, ATULL Gawande wrote that the medical system performs too often the tests, “unnecessarily, to reveal problems that are not quite problems to be fixed, unnecessarily, at the expense and without a few risks”.

For these reasons, some medical organizations, such as the Task Force for the preventive services of the United States, currently recommend PSA tests in men of age equal to or higher than seventies and advise younger men to speak with their doctors on potential screening damage: unnecessary biopsies, overduct diagnosis, including in which erective dysfunctions.

(Once, while reporting a piece, I got a full-bodied magnetic resonance imaging that discovered an indeterminate point in my prostate; a PSA test and a magnetic resonance imaging of follow-up later, it is not yet clear what it is.)

Of course, you can ask if these guidelines are sufficient for the leader of the free world. Trump, Barack Obama and George W. Bush shared all PSA results during their terms; Tuesday, the Biden office said that his last test was in 2014, when he had seventy -one.

A bright point for biden, in a moral of difficult news, is that its cancer seems to be “sensitive to hormones”.

The drugs that suppress testosterone can be used to treat the condition. Partisans may not agree on which types of health registers should release and if Biden should have been tested before. But something that is not in doubt is the role that medical research has played here.

When Biden was elected for the first time in the Senate, at twenty -nine, the life expectancy for men with metastatic prostate cancer was sad. Today, many patients live for years, the product of half a century of scientific progress.

The Trump administration is currently performing drastic cuts to the types of federal research that help to keep cancer patients alive. Biden was given the same serious prognosis that many thousands of Americans receive every year. Even American science should not be given.

Post views:
55