Writing as a man aged 66, you’d think I’d be concerned about prostate cancer, one of the current health hobby horses. In a way I am, but I also have an aversion to being told to worry about one thing after another, and my concerns also include the side-effects of treatment which are consistently overlooked in all sorts of contexts. I have seen what has happened to friends and relatives who have been diagnosed with prostate cancer.
When I watched a Hannah Fry Horizon documentary about her own cervical cancer experience, the side-effects of her treatment and the research she’d pursued, one of the most alarming points raised was that the risk of life-changing side effects from chemotherapy seemed to be somewhat higher than the risk from breast cancer. She asked “are we over-medicalising” cancer?
Now it seems that a major study running over 15 years has questioned the whole process of prostate cancer screening.
The Telegraph has the story:
Prostate cancer screening is likely to do more harm than good, experts have warned, after a 15-year trial showed one in six flagged cases was wrong.
The largest study to date investigating the PSA (Prostate-specific antigen) blood test, which is used as a screening tool in some European countries, found it had a small impact on reducing deaths, but also led to a worrying level of over-diagnosis.
In some cases, it missed early detection of some aggressive cancers.
Researchers from the universities of Bristol, Oxford and Cambridge, invited more than 400,000 men aged between 50-69 for screening, with just over half receiving a PSA test.
After following up for 15 years, nearly seven men out of every 1,000 in the group invited for screening had died from prostate cancer, compared to nearly eight men out of every 1,000 who had not been tested.
The results of the trial show that an estimated one in six cancers found by the single PSA screening were over-diagnosed leading to unnecessary treatment of tumours that would not have caused any harm in someone’s lifetime
The treatment of prostate cancer may cause physical side-effects including the possibility of infection following a biopsy, erectile dysfunction and bladder and bowel problems.
The key problems seem to involve missing the more aggressive cancers while subjecting other men given a positive diagnosis to treatment that may be unnecessary and causes more harm.
Dr. Neil Smith, GP for Cancer Research U.K. and GP Lead for Lancashire and South Cumbria Cancer Alliance, said: “With prostate cancer causing 12,000 deaths in the U.K. every year, we completely understand why men want to know if they have the disease, even when they don’t have symptoms.
“However, this research highlights that a PSA test for early detection can do more harm than good – it’s simply not accurate enough and can lead to some men having tests and treatment that they don’t need.”
Definitely worth reading in full.
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I don’t enough about all of this to comment on the rights and wrongs, but it does strike me how much more advanced alternative media seems to be in the USA compared to here. I wonder if we will ever catch up.
The slower we ‘catch up’ the better I will like it
Well, the USA seems madder than here, but the opposition to the madness is much stronger. I think whatever comes to the USA will come here, sooner or later, in spades, so opposition here needs to get a lot stronger. We’re still largely asleep – present company excepted.
They are much more commercially confident.
The Daily Sceptic for example.There is no doubt in my mind this can be a challenger publication to the establishment press. I’m so disillusioned with my subscriptions to the Times and The Telegraph. I’ve cancelled my The Times subscription due to their shockingly unacceptable full-on Fascist censorship. The Telegraph is only a tiny bit better and is just hanging in by a thread.
However The Daily Sceptic need an aggressive business plan, proper finance (which also implies taking a risk) and need to charge a subscription. Maybe like the Spectator offering a set number of free articles each month.
Sure the many existing readers will bitch and moan, but I for one would subscribe and I would rather they are a commercial success and rival to the establishment globalist agenda driven press.
I’m happy to pay my £5 a month
Luke Johnson is on the board but I guess he has limited time and would like it to be commercially self sufficient after an initial investment. A big problem is that they are blacklisted by the advertising intermediaries.
You’ve just made me feel bad because I’ve remembered that is an option and I chose to make a once off contribution. So I will put my money where my mouth is and pay a monthly sub. However I do think it should be mandatory. There is no getting away from the fact people either prepared to pay for what you have or they aren’t. IMO hedging around that can only worsen the finances.
I guess the issue is not to put off the casual reader with a paywall but I’m sure there are established approaches to that.
A lot of the BTL community here were indignant about the £5, and some pointed out they had other sites and publications in a similar space to which they subscribed. I have some sympathy for that but I was surprised by those who seemed to think they were entitled to free articles based on their BTL contributions.
I think advertising needs to be part of the mix. There is already some but possibly not paying much.
I’m £10 a month. Probably need to up it a bit. I pay Daily Wire an annual subscription. Daily Sceptic really needs to look into getting some financing from the USA.
Well done. I give to TCW too, though I don’t ever look at it – lack of time…
Fair point about the USA – could be a good market for them
You make a good point. I’d subscribe.
I can confirm that none of this matters to me.
It might not appear to be that important but it could be. Quite a few people I assumed were independent (e.g. Jordan B Peterson, Matt Walsh) have on their Facebook page, “The Daily Wire is responsible for this content” so that’s a bit strange if they’re independent. But who owns the Daily Wire? It’s not easy to find out (I watched a guy going through the process of trying to find out). As we don’t know who owns The Daily Wire, it could mean nothing very much but it could also be a brilliant way of dampening down independent voices?
The penalties in these contracts are massive for missed content and all kinds of other things and of course the enticement of $50 million is an offer most people can’t refuse. And other ways of raising funds are often difficult, one alternative news website recently was denied access to its own bank account, having been banned off all the usual social media sites, down listed by search engines etc . It’s potentially a brilliant scheme, offer ludicrous sums of money to stars/independent voices and penalise them heftily if they stray off course or even take a sick day whilst at the same time, making it hard for truly independent voices to fund themselves. Something to think about – not entirely sure what the answer is apart from as always, support things you don’t want to disappear – shops, cafes, independent voices etc but as usual question everything.
I cannot afford the mental cost of caring about every issue and this one is so far remote from my experience that it is not worth investing in it. I have reached an age and financial status (only modest) where I can plough my own furrow.
Take all your points on board about the continual censorship of any comment that doesn’t fit whatever the current narrative is etc, but can we just put this into perspective? 50 mill over 4 years divided by 365 days/year = $34,246 A DAY. I’d take a few limitations on gobbiness for that sort of cash. Having watched Crowder’s vid it just looked like he was having a hissy fit, and there were/are much more mature ways of dealing with contract negotiations. Perhaps he reckons it’s good publicity.
The key thing is that the term sheet was a starting negotiation draft. Crowder is already demonetised. So was Candace Owens, so that aspect of the terms sheet would be an immediate redline.
Crowder has gone berserk over a terms sheet, to be clear. Essentially, Crowder’s operation is one run by him and his parents and he doesn’t seem to have bothered to get his lawyers involved in negotiations. Candace Owens spent five months in negotiations. Crowder threw his toys out of the pram on day one.
Lauren Chen has done an excellent appraisal of the situation on her YouTube channel. She’s worked for The Blaze and had negotiations with Crowder and The Daily Wire.
the £100K per episode penalty was not for a sick day … it was for a voluntary decision to just not make a show … the ‘sick day’ was $60+K equivalent to the per show fees.
Crowder has been known to just clear off.
“I’m certainly not going to be goaded into a conflict with allies unless I can think of a way to monetize it.” [BabylonB, adapted]
It wasn’t the Daily Wire it was the Babylon Bee.
Yes, BB can always be relied on to take the sting out of a situation.
Meanwhile, in the latter-day sodom and gomorrah known as Davos, megalomaniacs are plotting our enslavement to technology and other worthless idols of the modern age. That seems like the real elephant in the room right now, not some guy and his job contract
Yes it does appear to be the case, that after every Davos, the thumb screw is turned a little more against the pleb. I can’t wait to hear how wonderful they are in whatever format they wish to publish it.
I lean towards the Wire on this one too. Crowder comes across as petulant and entitled. Imagine having to do 190 shows per year for a measly $50m, oh the inhumanity! It’s practically modern slavery.
The fuss about the social media clauses could also be taken out of context although It’s harder to tell on this one. I doubt the Wire rely on YouTube or Facebook revenue whereby they could not cope if a presenter is demonitised, but if Crowder did a YE and got banned entirely then it’s not unreasonable for an employer in the entertainment industry to impose penalties for that.
Agree. Crowder has a point but has used completely dirty and bad faith tactics to make it. It isn’t an exposé that needed to be made like that. If he really felt that strongly (and isn’t acting in bad faith – but I think he is) he should have spoken to the Daily Wire and said, look guys, I think this is a big enough issue for the industry, sorry I’m compelled to talk about it publicly. Even if he gave them no time for a lawyer response before doing so, that would have been a better way to handle it, consistent with someone acting in good faith.
Who are these people? Astonishing that they can be paid so much money and I don’t remotely recognise them or what they do!
Crowder is an idiot. I like what he ofter says, but he seems to have decided to start his own network by trying to destroy the Daily Wire. It’s the old idiocy that infects all sides: the desire for ideological purity. On the right, there is always more individualism and diversity of opinion, because the right doesn’t have the hive mind aim of a communist utopia that the left does. The trouble is that the most prominent voices on the right no only fail to get along, but spend more time slagging each other off than keeping an eye on the enemy. It goes back decades. Ayn Rand, Isabel Paterson, Murray Rothbard, William F Buckley Jr all flirted with each others ideas, but ended up hating each other. The Ayn Rand Institute spends hours slagging off The Objective Standard and The Atlas Society, plus anyone one else vaguely right of centre, acting as if only they know best. The Daily Mail has spent decades slagging off its right of centre ‘rivals’ while pumping out gallons of borderline pornography.
Unfortunately no one seems to get it into their thick skulls that there’s a war going on and we’re losing. Six or seven thousand people globally have got themselves into key positions in politics, big business, the media, civil services, medicine, governments and education and are systematically dismantling Western society… scratch that! … have dismantled Western society. We’re fighting a rearguard action and the people who are supposed to be on our side are too busy measuring the lengths of their d**ks!
I’ve been a Daily Wire subscriber for ages. They’re a good site – an oil billionaire-financed text and streaming site aimed at taking on Hollywood at their own game, making classy documentaries and moving into entertainment. A major part of their deal with Jordan Peterson was that Peterson could guarantee there was somewhere his work could be kept safe as the wolves have been set on him in the public arena. But DW represent one prong in the rearguard action (I’m beyond thinking we can win in our own countries: the best we can hope for is the foundation new countries or havens or ghettos to we which we or our descendants can flee in the next couple of generations.) And Jeremy Boreing is well known as a lover of negotiations. Daily Sceptic is another significant ‘prong’ in the fight.
The right needs to end the infighting. While they slag each other off, the left laughs and continues to hand out puberty blockers to children and teach them horrifying lies in school. And in 25 years’ time, many of us middle aged people will be lying in hospital for some sort of operation while these Red Guard kids will doctors be deciding whether to treat us properly or ‘allow’ us to die on the operating table because they’ve been taught to hate our politics.
Although extremely dark your comment is about right …. sadly.
I’ll keep believing in the white pill though because Ive got a 20 yr old son and have to
Thank heavens I’m not a fan of overpaid American alternative media ‘celebrities’. I do hope this doesn’t disqualify me from the Daily Sceptic?
Of course not. But the alternative scene is more than just media in the USA: it’s becoming a full blown alternative economy. When Harry’s Razors stopped advertising on Daily Wire, tossing a woke hand grenade on the way out talking about a ‘values misalignment’ in order to cozy up to the far left, Jeremy Boreing launched Jeremy’s Razors and they proved to be a big success.
Eric July, rapper and libertarian pundit has launched his own comic book company. So has Ethan Van Sciver, formerly a successful creator at DC Comics. They aren’t creating conservative or libertarian comics: they’re simply creating comics that don’t have woke messaging. For that, they’re under constant attack as ‘far right’.
Unfortunately, this kind of alternative economy doesn’t exist in the UK and the extremists who run our country won’t let it happen. When Gillette went woke and attacked their male customer base, I stopped using them, but I’ve yet to find as good a brand of razor as a replacement, having used them for 30 years!