The PSA test is wrong 80 percent of the time
Warning: Avoid this dangerous, very common test that’s almost always wrong
It’s being called a “public health disaster,” a “calamity.”
I’m talking about a test that is wrong 80 percent of the time — yet still embraced by doctors as the most important thing a man can do to protect his health.
And it’s being done for just two reasons: “fear and money.”
That comes directly from the doctor who started it all — by discovering something called a “prostate-specific antigen.”
It’s those three letters that can send a man on a crash course to disaster — P-S-A.
I first told you about how unreliable PSA testing is more than 10 years ago. And that a single result should never be the reason to have a biopsy done.
And over the years I’ve been hearing more and more experts sounding the alarm about it.
But this is a different kind of warning.
Because it comes from the man who first discovered PSA to begin with, Dr. Richard Ablin.
Dr. Albin also discovered that a high PSA level could be found in men who had prostate cancer.
And guess where else this doctor found elevated PSA levels? In men with healthy prostates!
In fact, Dr. Ablin said that the “PSA test is not cancer-specific.” A man can have a low PSA result and have prostate cancer, or a very high reading and not.
So the test is just about meaningless.
Now, Dr. Ablin isn’t the lone expert sounding the alarm about routine PSA screening.
This spring, Dr. Herbert Lepor, chair of the department of urology at NYU Langone Medical Center, said that “The majority of prostate cancers…are not significant,” and “they would be best not diagnosed.”
But this warning from Dr. Ablin goes way beyond that.
What he’s saying is not just that most prostate cancers are best left alone — but that the test itself doesn’t work. It’s wrong 80 percent of the time!
Dr. Ablin believes “that the use of the PSA test for screening asymptomatic men was strictly for money — a lot of money.”
And remember, this is the doc who discovered PSAs back in 1970!
Now, you guys know what can happen when a PSA screening returns “high” numbers.
“They go from PSA, to ultrasonography, to biopsy. It’s a cash cow,” Dr. Ablin says.
The “rule” of yearly PSA screenings got its firmly cemented foothold back in 1994 because of three other little letters — F-D-A.
That was when the FDA approved it for routine use in all men 50 and older.
Dr. Ablin says that during the FDA advisory board meeting back in 1993, experts agreed that PSA screening should not be used as a test for prostate cancer.
Yet the FDA went ahead and gave the test its blessings.
Dr. Ablin notes that it cost around a million dollars to get that FDA nod.
“Does that mean anything? I can’t prove it, but something went on to lead to this approval,” he said. “How else would they have approved a test with an 80 percent false-positive rate?”
Dr. Ablin is so outraged at how his discovery of PSA was “hijacked” by Big Pharma just to make big bucks that he documented it in a book called The Great Prostate Hoax.
He said the inspiration for the book came when he was told by several Big Pharma heads a few years ago that this test will never go away because “too many people are making too much money to stop this.”
Like I said, we’ve been warning you for years not to get — or rely on — this test. But now you have it right from the horse’s prescription pad:
The PSA is useless and is more about being able to bill you than cure you.
Sources:
“PSA test is misused, unreliable, says the antigen’s discoverer” Eric J. Topol, MD, August 8, 2014, Medscape, Medscape.com
