The Dogma in cancer care has always been that preventing cancer is better than treating it. So routine screening for the early detection of the disease makes a lot of sense.
But a government group says that logic doesn't apply when it comes to the prostate-specific antigen (PSA) test for prostate cancer. Regular screening doesn't always save lives once you account for the high rate of false-positive results, and it increases men's risk of serious complications from biopsies and treatment of tumors that would never have killed them. So in new guidelines concluding that the harms of testing outweigh the benefits,...