I do remember Brawley and his comments on a 43yo AA male with family history but that as I recall he said "he would consider..." as opposed to he would do it. Catalona and Brawley butted a few times with drastically disparate points of views. Not surprising of course.
From the NPR:
"Brawley is himself an expert in prostate cancer treatment. And as opposed as he is to indiscriminate mass screening, he says he's not against PSA testing if doctors and patients go into it with
open eyes, after a frank discussion of potential harms and benefits.
But while he thinks the Preventive Services Task Force
"got it right," he says it needs to do a better job of explaining itself. As in the mammography screening controversy of 2009, the task force's analytical language leaves it
open to the charge that it's unsympathetic to men's prostate cancer fears and diagnostic dilemma — coldhearted even.
"I wish the task force's wording were a little bit more user-friendly," Brawley says.
Instead of saying that doctors should stop doing PSA "routinely," he says, maybe it should have said they shouldn't do them "automatically."
That leaves the door
open to a doctor-patient discussion about
the pros and cons. And that's exactly what the task force says it wants to do."
I am not sure where he is with "got it right". But I am certain he is on a very unpopular platform by saying the USPSTF got anything right in regards to screening for prostate cancer.
Grants for 2013 from the ACS...
www.cancer.org/research/currentlyfundedcancerresearch/grants-by-cancer-type There is an indisputable variation of grants by gender at the ACS. But I do not doubt for a minute that the decision to pull out of supporting men's support groups was a business decision and probably a good one. The ACS contributed 27m last year to PCa, it will be interesting to see if it drops a few million by closing these groups up. By comparison, the largest non-profit group is not the ACS but the Prostate Cancer Foundation at 30m per year. I think that it's reasonable that the ACS pull back as they receive a great deal of contributions from the other cancers and probably less so from the prostate cancer survivors.
Whether this is from the recent negative publicity they have received by the advocacies, whether reasonable or not, or from the patient pool, has to be concerning for the ACS. I don't think that by closing these groups, in an apparent "cone of silence", will do much to improve their image with men either. I would hope that they are at least trying to help these guys stay in active groups moving forward.
Tony