PSA Testing: A Public Health Disaster...According To The Inventor

Okay, men over fifty, here’s your quiz for the day. What blood test does your medical doctor want you to get on a regular basis and what does it check for? If you answered the PSA [Prostate Specific Antigen] test and prostate cancer, you win a gold star. That’s what we have all been told. At least one person has an issue with the PSA test as the gold standard for prostate health testing. He just happens to be the one who invented the PSA test in 1970.

Richard J. Ablin is currently a research professor of immunobiology and pathology at the University of Arizona College of Medicine. He states that PSA testing amounts to a “hugely expensive public health disaster.” In his op-ed piece in the N.Y. Times he points out that since the test doesn’t distinguish between the prostate cancer that will kill you and the one that won’t, it’s not much better than a coin toss. The PSA test was approved by the FDA because it could detect 3.8 percent of prostate cancers which was an improvement over the digital rectal exam. Ablin states that men are much more likely to die with prostate cancer than from it. In short, he believes that the billions of dollars spent on the test are a huge waste of resources and lead to many unnecessary procedures.

It will be interesting to see if the PSA test inventor’s opinion shakes up the status quo on prostate recommendations. Personally, [and cynically] I don’t think it will. There’s too much money at stake.

— Richard Fink, DC, FIAMA

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