The director of the new Texas Institute for Robotic Surgery has a bone to pick with the members of the United States Preventive Services Task Force with regards the PSA testing. Here is what Dr Fagin has to say.

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The task force is the respected panel that earlier this month recommended that healthy men no longer get the prostate antigen specific blood test for prostate cancer.
Dr. Randy Fagin, a urologist and prostate cancer surgeon now heading up the robotic surgery institute, is horrified

“In the era before PSA testing,” said Fagin, “patients were typically diagnosed at a point that either they were never going to die of their cancer or there was nothing we could do about their cancer. It didn’t provide us a large opportunity to be able to cure those folks that sit in the middle. PSA testing provides us that opportunity.”
But the task force draft recommendation concludes that while PSA testing does save lives, that comes at too great a cost. The body argues that positive PSA results lead to far too many painful biopsies that can result in serious infections.

Fagin passionately disagrees.

It’s hard for me, as a physician,” he argues, “to say that saving lives will never have a cost to it. Saving lives always has a cost to it. And surgery is certainly as much an art as it is a science and if you put those two together, it means that we do our best to help as many people as we can.

Over treating some individuals is worth the benefit you give to those folks who truly require it.”

What the task force is saying,” he said, “and what as a physician, I have a hard time really accepting is that there is a line and at a certain point in time, this number of lives isn’t worth saving.

“For the greater good of the community, this number of lives isn’t worth it. And I’ve seen those lives; they’ve been my patients. And to say that those lives aren’t worth it, regardless of the number, is hard for me as a physician to accept

The most important thing that I think people can do is to become informed and becoming informed means getting your PSA. If you have a diagnosis of cancer, get multiple opinions; learn about all the different options and make an informed decision.”

Ref:  http://www.kxan.com/dpp/news/local/doctor-challenges-new-psa-guidelines