How A Physician May Be To Blame For Delay In Diagnosing Prostate Cancer Until It Metastasizes

Consider that your doctor physically examines your prostate gland for any signs of potential cancer including an enlargement or a hardening of the prostate and whether there are any nodules palpable on the gland. Imagine the physician orders blood tests, including a PSA test which is used for the early diagnosis of prostate cancer. So far, so good. This is how to check whether a male without any symptoms of prostate cancer might actually have it. Imagine the tests came back outside the normal range

However, a number of physicians do not advise men who are asymtomatic to test for prostate cancer. They argue that screening has little, if any, value. One factor, nevertheless, remains consistent. If the result of a screening test is abnormal the patient should be informed of the results and either be referred to a specialist or be told about the option for diagnostic testing, such as a biopsy. Once more, though, some doctors also take the position that, at least under certain circumstances, a male patient who is diagnosed with prostate cancer does not need to treat it immediately and simply needs to carefully monitor the cancer.

Should this happen, the cancer becomes incurable before the patient turns symptomatic and is finally diagnosed. However, if a physician detected that the patient's prostate was enlarged or there was a nodule on the gland and the PSA test results showed abnormally high levels of the antigen and the doctor failed to notify the man of the abnormal results, the patient would likely assume that meant there was no need to follow up.

In case the male does actually have cancer, not telling the patient that he may have cancer will postpone his diagnosis. A delay could, in turn, give the cancer time to reach an advanced stage. When a cancer metastasizes treatment can at best lessen the pace of the spread of the cancer and reduce the effects (like pain) of the cancer. There is a type of cases in which the male patient was ultimately diagnosed but by that time the cancer was advanced and a cure was no longer plausible.

Screening tests may yield false positives. This means that some patients with abnormal screening results actually do not have cancer. But doing screening tests for cancer is meaningless without follow up as it gives the patient a false sense of security thinking that he has no cancer as the physician screened him and said nothing to him that the screening tests revealed the possibility of cancer. Physicians normally acknowledge that there is a need for follow up when the results of screening tests come back as abnormal.

Article Source: http://www.free-article-info.com/ArticleDashboard

Joseph Hernandez is an attorney accepting cancer cases. You can learn about metastatic prostate cancer and other cancer matters including stage 4 breast cancer visit the websites

Please Rate this Article

5 out of 54 out of 53 out of 52 out of 51 out of 5 

Not yet Rated