> Apparently, it is possible to detect the possibility of prostate cancer many, many years before it is going to develop with a more sensitive, modern test. Once the detection is made both patient and doctor are not in a position to ignore it.

I'll tell you a story from when my mother was in medical school.

There was a class one day in which the students were given a pile of slides of prostate samples and told to identify the cancerous one. Many, many questions ensued, of the form "This looks kind of cancerous. Is this the slide?"

Eventually the professor announced to the class "look, there's a bit of cancer in everyone's prostate. The goal here is to find the slide with OBVIOUS cancer."

And this is, to the best of my knowledge, still the state of things in prostate cancer today. All prostates are cancerous. A man who lived long enough would eventually be killed by prostate cancer -- a cancer detectable long, long before he actually died. But most men die of other things, because prostate cancer develops so slowly.

Ignoring prostate cancer is in fact a common way to handle it, if the patient is old enough or the cancer is small enough when detected. The technical term for this is "watchful waiting".