FINALLY, I CAN EXHALE

Seamus Barry Weise

 

The Fall edition of Quest, the Fred Hutch newsletter, is out.  Of particular interest are three very short items, written in unadorned English, without even a fleck of Bio-chemical-ese to slow the reader down.  The first article concerns high dosage estrogen-laden birth control pills; you shouldn’t take them, although the low dosage kind are okay.  The second deals with early detection of lung cancer; it is possible, and would save nearly 55,000 lives per year, but would cost $9.4 billion.  Worth it, I say.  Finally, there is an interesting re-take on the question of screening men using the prostate-specific antigen (PSA).  Our old friends the USPSTF (United States Preventative Services Task Force) recommend against using it on the usual grounds: cost, over-treatment, and unnecessary anxiety.  Hutch researchers at least partially disagree.  They calculate that using PSA as an early warning signal would save between 36,000 and 57,000 deaths per year.  I repeat: damned well worth it.  The Hutch researchers do suggest discontinuing PSA and adopting the “watch and wait” approach for men over 70, because most prostate cancers grow so slowly that the carrier will die of something else before the cancer gets ‘em.  Makes sense.

Here is the web address:  http://www.fredhutch.org/en/news/quest/2014-09/hutch-news.html#psa

This blog is notably short and perhaps unintelligible, because my mind is elsewhere.  My great, strapping, indescribably cute great grandson is just out of major surgery and currently in the recovery room.  The operation involved a seemingly impossible manipulation of his skull!  All seems to have gone well.  The work was done at Children’s Hospital in Seattle, which deserves its international reputation as a “go to” place.  Thank you Lord, Children’s, and medical science in general.  You may not know what to do about ovarian cancer, but you do get lots of things right.