Prostate cancer could be treated by destroying tumors with electric currents

that's the therapies we want to see more of

happy that your family could enjoy some more time

take care

It's a screening blood test which, when positive, makes you go get a more serious exam. So the effect of a false positive is that you get, say, an MRI. So at worst, 3x the required number of MRIs will be taken due to such screening. It's not even excessive irradiation of people.

> we don't have enough evidence yet to support this as screening

For the general population, you may be right, I'm not an epidemiologist. For people with a strong family history of prostate cancer it's a different story. The point is the different people need to consider different checkups based on their personal medical situation and family history.

> literature is 3% infection rate requiring hospitalization

Prostate cancer rarely requires hospitalization - unless you do nothing about it for so long that it metastasizes. Otherwise, treatment is typically as an outpatient. So that metric is also not really relevant I would say.

> PSA screening does not improve overall mortality

Again, wrong metric. You can wait until symptoms appear and still have very low chances of mortality, but the damage due to treatment is much more significant.

The point is to catch the prostate cancer early enough, that treatment can get rid of it with very little damage to surrounding tissue.

> this is not true in US, to a minimal extent in Canada

In the US, a large part of the population is not even cared for medically: There is no universal automatic coverage of residents.

Also - medical health providers can easily bring up arguments such as those you have brought up, to avoid screening even conditionally for various health risks.

So I believe you have an overly lenient evaluation of screening policies.

> The reason no one is pushing PSA screening on you is because most physicians don't believe it

Based on your questionable choice of arguments and facts, I am not very credulous that this statement is indeed true, and that a proper survey with the proper question and relevant information has been put to the relevant physicians.

At any rate, at least first link you gave, to the description of the issue by the AUA, is very saddening, because they also mis-represent the dilemma, and apparently aren't bothered about people's quality of life as long as they don't die. I've been told otherwise by more than one Eurologist, and with an insistence to the degree of making me set a phone calendar appointment several years from now to remind me to go get my first PSA blood test.

The question is whether your body sees and kills the cancer cells; most of the time it does, which is why most of us can live pleasantly for most of our lives despite errors cropping up silently. What we term cancer are the cancer cells that slipped past our body's defences, growing into masses that cause no end of grief.

To put it in computer terms, it's like error correction in HDDs and SSDs and ethernet connections. Errors are inevitably going to occur while data is in transit, but they are of no concern so long as error correction and other such mechanisms can correct and recover. The errors do become a concern when they start slipping past such mechanisms, however.

Some guidelines suggest that it's reasonable to continue in patients with >10-15 year life expectancy if the patient desires, but there is no strong recommendation or evidence to support this recommendation or screening in this age group.

Some guidelines actually have a strong recommendation to stop screening men with < 15 year life expectancy.

Even less evidence for a DRE. PSA by a GP is sufficient if you desire screening.