Former pharma: more bad treatments for bad legs

Danger Man’s Doctor devotees will remember our belated expose of the National Infirmary for Bad Legs – an elaborate long-con hospital that lured thousands into shelling out for a quack leg treatment called Tremol in the early decades of the 20th century.

A British Medical Association investigation of Tremol in 1912 showed that it was a toxic combination of calcium choloride, ferric chloride, hydrochloric acid and rhubarb infusion.

Now, thanks to our reader Marlene Dawson, there are further revelations to be shared. Ms Dawson picked up a dog-eared edition of “Your Bad Leg and The Reason Why” – the Bible of Tremol use – at a jumble sale in Manchester, and kindly sent it to me. It includes a beautiful “Guarantee” from the National College of Health Limited and Infirmary for Bad Legs, complete with a picture of the infirmary. Ms Dawson points out the building still exists on Great Clowes Street, Salford, and is now home to media businesses and fashion photographers. 

The guarantee superbly undertakes to refund all money paid for Tremol treatment if it fails to cure after “a reasonable length of time”, while also stating in the conditions (very small print): “We must be the judges of what is a reasonable time. We give no warranties.”

“Your Bad Leg” sets out the supposedly scientific basis by which Tremol purifies the blood, and therefore cures all types of ulcer, varicose veins and eczema. And its brazen denunciation of quack treatments illustrates superbly how patent remedies throughout history have clung to the edges of respectability, knowing that confidence is at the heart of every con.

“What the proprietors of these so-called cures claim is an impossibility, and the assertions they make are untrue,” it reads. “But this is the treatment foisted on you by unscrupulous persons, and the worst of it is, if you willingly submit yourself to such arrant quackery you become so sceptical when a genuine and guaranteed cure is brought before you, like Tremol, and pains taken with your case, and a lasting cure offered to you that you can hardly believe it is possible, and you doubt that such a thing as a real cure can exist.”

Well, it’s got me. I’m in.

The circle of ignorance and why stupid people think they know everything

“The more you know, the more you know you don’t know.” So wise is the saying (or something like it) that at different times it’s been attributed to Aristotle, Socrates, David Byrne, Donald Trump, Albert Einstein. And me.

A psychologist once demonstrated to me the truth of the saying using a simple visual analogy: let’s call it the circle of ignorance. If everything you know is represented as a circle, then everything you don’t know lies outside the circle. The circle’s border is the limits of your knowledge, and defines your awareness of what you don’t know. By the laws of geometry, the more you know, the bigger the circle, the larger its circumference, the greater your awareness of what you don’t know.

Only stupid people (and reality TV billionaires) think they know everything.

But we can all get a bit a swept away with scientific advance and forget that answering any question usually results in several new questions.  I’ve recently been writing a piece for a national magazine examining exactly how close we are to conquering cancer. And the answer, despite the astounding progress we’ve made since 1970, is still “not very”.  

Just ten years ago, the scientific world was quivering in excitement at a new breed of targeted cancer drugs called monoclonal antibodies that would transform cancer into a condition you lived with rather than died of. And they were certainly a great step forward: today they are helping many people live longer. But no-one’s saying they’re game-changers any more. We’ve discovered that cancers become resistant to them and their effects are often short-lived.

So immunotherapy – treatments that get the body’s own immune system to fight cancer – has become the next big hope for cancer. Again the headlines raise the prospect of cancer being beaten. But the more immunotherapy treatments are tested, the more we understand the severity of their side effects, the more we understand that cancer evolves to evade these approaches too.  

Cause for us to put our heads in our hands and despair? Of course not. Advances in our knowledge of cancer and how to treat it mean we’re twice as likely to survive 10 years after a cancer diagnosis as we were 40 years ago. But let’s start accepting that we’re not always as clever as we think we are. And let’s stop expecting scientists to answer what might be impossible questions.

Cake and regurgitating babies: words, words, words

Think about the words you hear, and how they affect you. When someone says: “Would you like a slice of chocolate sponge cake?” does that somehow paint a different picture in your mind than “Would you like a segment of baked fat-flour mixture?”. Of course it does. It might even affect whether you accepted a piece or not.

Over the past three days, attending a splendid British Medical Journal conference on overdiagnosis in Oxford, it struck me again and again (and to be honest, it’s been a bee in my bonnet for a while now) how the words chosen by doctors, companies, charities, politicians and newspapers to describe our health affect our decisions. Hugely.

The most obvious example is sticking the word “disease” on the end of other words that represent, in themselves, a fairly harmless concept. The "D" word will get a normal person’s stress hormones flowing, induce fears for the future, and influence actions. Most likely, it makes us rush for tests and treatment.

Assistant Professor Scherer, from the University of Missouri, investigated this, and presented her results at the conference. Any parent knows that babies can vomit milk in a rather alarming way: it's often called reflux, colic, regurgitation. Recently, doctors have taken to classifying more extreme cases as gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD). And interestingly the rise of this "new" condition coincided with a dramatic rise in the use of medications to treat GERD. Even though research indicates the medications bring no benefit whatsoever.

Laura Scherer investigated. She took 275 parents through a scenario, asking them to imagine that their child regurgitated and cried excessively. They were all told that medications didn’t help. But half the parents were told that the doctor in the scenario diagnosed the condition as gastroesophageal reflux disease, and half were not. 

The result? The parents told that the condition had a long name ending in “disease” showed considerably more interest in medicating the child, even though they knew the medicine was unlikely to work. And they were also less likely to believe that the child would get better without medication. In other words, use of the "D" word would lead to them over-treating their child with a useless medicine.

Doctors and policy makers struggle with why people make bad health decisions, or get over-anxious about their health. And often – very often – the answer is that simple. Words, words, words.

Former Pharma: Tremol and the National Infirmary for Bad Legs

What’s the difference between a legitimate medicine and a quack cure? Until medicine regulations were introduced in the 1960s, it was virtually impossible to tell – especially when the product was being marketed by medics at a national hospital. Supposedly.

Step forward Tremol – a cure for “varicose ulcers, varicose eczema, sore legs, swollen legs, painful joints”, widely advertised in story magazines of the 1910s and 1920s. Its purveyors? The National Infirmary for Bad Legs in Manchester. Yes really. They apparently worked from Ward CA (occasionally ER) of the institution on Great Clowes Street in Broughton. “Every form of bad leg succumbs to this new treatment” said the advertisement. “You are cured to stay cured for all time.”

The form the “infirmary” actually took is uncertain – there are no records of any type of hospital on Great Clowes Street. But we do know that the British Medical Association investigated it as early as 1912, and found evidence of pressurised selling. It also found no sign of supervision by a “fully qualified medical man” as the infirmary claimed. “If there is a registered medical man connected with the place, he is certainly acting in a way that makes him liable to be arraigned before the General Medical Council.”

The BMA’s analysis of the “Tremol blood mixture” (one teaspoon to be taken morning and evening) revealed the following ingredients: calcium chloride, ferric chloride, hydrochloric acid, rhubarb infusion, peppermint, water. Nasty. Yet Tremol clearly had a market and continued to be sold until at least 1928. Bad legs make you desperate, you see. 

Deafened by a killer yukka (nearly)

Clogwog/Foter/Creative Commons

Last week I was nearly deafened by a yukka plant. It’s certainly up there, as odd injuries go. You may be interested to know that every year there are around 2,500 household plant-related injuries reported in the UK, though I haven’t been able to find out how many are caused by yukkas.

The overgrown houseplant toppled off the window ledge as I was trying to open a window, and it sent one of its sharp spear-like leave straight down my ear canal. The pain when it hit my eardrum was exquisite. My hearing started to go all buzzy.

The reaction of my doctor (and this is the reason I’m writing about this) improved my morale no end. As I told him what had happened, he actually grimaced (I think I was expecting laughter at my unluckiness). Then, taking up his otoscope, he looked in my ear. He delivered his assessment: “Ouch”, he said. I could have hugged him. 

What we expect from doctors is mild chastisement, or impatience, or bewilderment. What I got was a little bit of honest human empathy, and I didn’t feel such a fool any more. 

“You’ve got a huge blood blister on your ear drum,” he said. “But don’t worry, it should get better by itself. Even if the ear drum is punctured, it should heal over. Come back if it gets any worse.”

More plus marks for my doctor. “It will get better by itself.” That’s what I like to hear. Most things do. I remember another doctor at the surgery, whose first reaction to a mysterious and huge swelling on my daughter’s foot was to squeeze it to see if it popped. “First do no harm” indeed. I’ve never consulted him again.

I can hear fine how.  No buzzing. The yukka has been pushed into a safe corner. And my faith in medicine has been boosted no end by my doctor's well-judged squeamishness and inaction.

"I say Holmes, have you seen this rum story about meningiomas in today's Times?"

The curious case of the mobile phone and the elusive tumour 

I’ve been trying to think of the right word to describe how we should read health stories in newspapers, magazines and online. Sceptically? No, that’s not right.

My thoughts are prompted partly by the fact that I’m judging several journalism awards at the moment, and partly by stories that have appeared in the Daily Mail and the Guardian on new evidence of a link between mobile phone use and brain tumours. This week Cancer Research UK published an excellent analysis of these stories.

The mobile phone stories reported that a new study had found that people who used their phones more than 15 hours each month had two to three times the risk of developing glioma and meningioma tumours. Cancer Research UK has, in turn, provided the context.

The headlines are misleading, it says. The quoted study was small and had several flaws. Many larger, more authoritative studies have indicated that there is no link. No study can be taken in isolation, and all have limitations. Quite right. As Cancer Research UK says: “When the media report small increases in already-small chances as meaning people who do a particular thing are ‘particularly likely’ to develop a disease it not only is a complete misrepresentation of what a study says or means. It also scares people.”

Yet I’ve been there. There are immense pressures on journalists to produce stories that sell or scare. PR people are also constantly selling us stories about health benefits or concerns, often seemingly quoting reputable research – which only on close analysis are revealed to be a distortion of the facts or part of a sophisticated marketing campaign (often from industry) designed to look independent and science-based.

Sometimes journalists peddle out the sell or scare stories. But sometimes – a lot of the time – journalist are very good at revealing the oversimplifications, exagerrations and even deceptions we are fed, not just by industry but by charities and scientists themselves. Don’t just think Thalidomide and MMR, think the current sugar controversy and the way the media has spotlighted clashes in the scientific about the benefits and drawbacks of statins.

So how should we respond, when we read about cancer and mobile phones, sugar addiction, statin side-effects or miracle-working?

With scepticism? No, scepticism is not the word. Not pragmatism either – which sounds as if we shouldn’t care. I wondered about intelligence, but not all of us can immediately access knowledge to help guide our judgement. If only we could all be Sherlock Holmes, capable of using a knowledge-packed, rapier-sharp mind to cut through concealments to recognise the truth for what it is.

The best I can come up with is that we should approach all these stories with curiosity – the very quality that produces the best in health journalism. We can all wonder, ask questions, and refer elsewhere to fill in gaps in our knowledge. In an information-rich world, doing a little bit of your own legwork isn’t that big a commitment on subjects that really matter. We’re all capable of saying: “Really?”; “According to whom?”; “Do other studies have the same finding?”; “What criminal mastermind might be behind this?”

We may not all be Sherlock Holmes, but most of us can be John Watson – diligent, alert to clues, hungry for the truth and prepared to ask someone else if we don’t know the answer.

Age of the sugar-free caveman

High protein diets are as deadly as cigarettes. Sugar is addictive and the real cause of diabetes and the obesity epidemic. Diets high in saturated fat are not bad for you...

Boy, it’s been a week and a half of headlines when it comes to diet. Healthy eating? It’s all up in the air.

As far as I’m concerned, the uncertainty is a good thing. Health and diet isn’t about having lots of the things that are “good” for you and none of the things that are “bad” for you. It’s about balance. Not least because our knowledge about what is good and bad is constantly changing – remember it took 150 years of tobacco use before we finally worked out it was bad for you in 1950. 

But balance isn’t easy for us, because our environment is constantly discouraging us from moderation. The world of market forces depends on giving us more and more of what we want.

Yesterday I was talking to a representative of food and drinks companies, who asked me how the industry could get the trust of the public and journalists like me. (This, appropriately enough, was on the day that Sally Davies, England’s chief medical officer, suggested a sugar tax in the face of the food industry’s reluctance to reformulate sugary products.)

It struck me as a curious question. I tried to explain to her that trust is a strange quality to expect from a journalist, whose job it is not to trust anything. Even for the general public, “trust” is complex: just because you trust a company to provide a crisp that gives you the flavour you want, it doesn’t mean you trust it to provide something healthy. 

I suggested to her (perhaps a little too bluntly) that the words food, industry and health are incompatible. As long as food production is organised into large companies, the priority will be – has to be – making money. Making money out of food involves giving people what they want.

If foods that naturally appeal to us are offered to us at very affordable prices, then we are going to eat more and more of them. And the fact of human biology is that we are programmed to crave foodstuffs that, in our ancient history, gave us an important survival boost but were available only in small quantities. For ancient man, getting some sugar and fat into your system over the course of a long winter might be the difference between surviving and dying. Today, such is the surplus of sugar and fat we are confronted with that they are the threat to survival.

It’s all about supply and demand. For our health’s sake, what we need to do is artificially create a new caveman environment: free from the danger of famine, free from the danger of surplus. 

One way to do that would be to control how much of these products we could afford, for example by introducing a sugar tax, as proposed by Sally Davies. Not a bad idea, not perfect. Another way would be to ask the food and drink industry to genuine re-think everything they do: limit the supply of the foodstuffs we crave, make genuine efforts to reformulate products, stop trying to convince us that brands full of sugar, fat or salt are really “healthy”, embark on a national, collaborative endeavour to reshape our tastes.

Do I “trust” them to do that? No, I’m afraid I don’t, and that’s what I told the unfortunate woman on the telephone. They simply wouldn’t take the risk to profit. The food industry thrives on “more” and “less”, “high in...” and “low in..”, “good for...” “bad for” – those are the marketing messages that produce profit. Our bodies don’t thrive in that world. So, barring everyone becoming self-sufficient, it looks as if taxes and government interventions are the only way forward.

Forgotten gurus: Lionel Stebbing

“Be tall”; “Robust health”; “Manly strength”; “Double your stamina”. Through the 1920s and 30s, advertisements for the Stebbing System in comics and magazines tantalised boys and young men with the prospect of a rock-hard, muscle-bound and lofty manhood. Much the kind of vision dangled before men today in Men’s Health magazine. 

“Your height increased in 14 days or money back” promised Lionel Stebbing, who called himself a personal consultant in body building and health practitioner. “I positively guarantee to give you perfect health and double your stamina in 30 days or return your money in full.”

All you had to do was send Mr Stebbing five shillings, then simply adhere to the suggestions Mr Stebbing sent to you in the form of a typewritten “4-in-1 supercourse”.  The course was a mere matter of meeting his daily requirement over the course of two weeks: 27 exercises, two and a half hours outdoors, relaxing, smiling, never bearing a grudge, drinking a quart of milk, eating fruit, vegetables and dripping, taking patent vitamins, deep breathing exercises, muscle control movements, bathing in Stebbing bath revitaliser... and much much more.

Sound advice perhaps (apart from the dripping) – but could a young lad’s life possibly accommodate so much healthy activity in 14 days?  

But Mr Stebbing was no fool. A man of many talents, his other publications included: “The Secret of Beautiful Magnetic Eyes”, “Stronger Sight without Glasses”, “How to Develop a Perfect Voice”, “Music, it’s Occult Basis and Healing Value” and “The Correction of Stammering”.  

It was only when he neared the end of his career, in the 1960s, that he let the cat out of the bag about his own dubious expertise in all these matters, when he published two little business books candidly titled: “How I made a fortune with a home mail order business” and “How you can build a second income fortune at home without special skill or expertise”. 

Yes, all Mr Stebbing’s endeavours selling his skills were made without any skill – apart from entrepreneurial, creative and typewriting ones – from his small semi-detached house at 28, Dean Road in Willesden, London – a house you can still see to this day. Alas there is no blue plaque.

A letter to Bill Bailey part 2: the scary bits

Dear Bill Bailey

Hyena Reality/Free Digital Photos

Here is my (probably not) much-awaited second letter to you. As you’ll remember, I’ve got worries about the messages that Prostate Cancer UK is putting out as part of their Men United campaign – a campaign that, with your involvement, is already having widespread coverage on television, in print media and online.

Prostate Cancer UK – and in particular its Chief Executive Owen Sharp –  has taken to saying as part of the campaign that “by 2030, prostate cancer will be the most common cancer”. Scary.

It’s certainly a useful message to spread if you’re an organisation that wants to raise awareness and lots of money – make prostate cancer have the same sort of public impact as breast cancer. 

Unfortunately, it’s also badly misleading to the public. Money shouldn’t be raised by throwing around convenient statistics to frighten people, when they are only a small part of a complex picture.

The figure much quoted by PCUK comes from a study in the British Journal of Cancer in 2011, which predicted that prostate cancer incidence among men would rise 2% between 2007 and 2030 (doesn’t sound quite so frightening does it?). 

It also stated that, although the estimated rise in cases of prostate is partly attributable to an ageing population, it is also the result of more and more men having PSA tests, uncovering disease that wouldn’t previously have ever been known about.

The authors give an explicit warning: “There is considerable uncertainty,” they say, “in predicting prostate cancer incidence, which is being driven not only by an inherent increase in risk of the disease, but also by the over-diagnosis (and over-treatment) as a consequence of testing with PSA.” 

In other words, increased awareness of prostate cancer causes more prostate cancer. Men Utd, ironically, will raise the incidence of prostate cancer.

I hope you understand that there is no way I want to belittle prostate cancer and its impact. My father died of it, I am at higher risk than most men. But Prostate Cancer UK and Movember (which have been increasingly closely aligned) want to make prostate cancer into a men’s version of breast cancer – same high profile, same kind of campaigns, same fundraising clout – without learning the lessons from breast cancer, without thinking how prostate cancer is different than breast cancer, and without thinking about the costs of getting things wrong. The cost, unfortunately, will be a very large number of men suffering unnecessarily. 

If PCUK really wants to help men it needs to be responsible. It needs to recognise that powerful fundraising messages aren’t the same as valuable public education messages. I hope you will discuss this with them.

Thank you for reading this. Now I will leave you alone to be wonderful, funny and inspiring again.

Simon

A letter to Bill Bailey

Dear Mr Bailey

I’m a fan, but hopefully not in a spooky way. My children have been brought up on Part Troll, Dandelion MInd, your Remarkable Guide to the Orchestra and even your peculiar Birdwatching Bonanza. I’m delighted that, as frontman for Prostate Cancer UK’s Men United campaign, you’re lending your support to fighting prostate cancer. It’s a really worthwhile cause, and better treatments, support and screening tests are desperately needed. 

But I’d like you to think about about a couple of things that Prostate Cancer UK is encouraging you to say. Because the fact is that your advice may hurt more men than it helps.

You’ve been advising men to talk to their doctors about the prospect of prostate cancer – even if they have no risk factors, family history or symptoms. This week’s PCUK campaign was launched with the message that men should “man up” and start the conversation.

With what object? 

You will know that there is currently no effective screening test for prostate cancer – only a very inaccurate one (the PSA test) which leads to unnecessary and harmful biopsies, and unnecessary and harmful prostate surgery. So what happens after men have manned up for the conversation with their GP?

Let’s imagine that the Men United campaign is a huge success: so successful, in fact, that all men over the age of 50 go to their GPs and start talking about their prostate cancer. And let’s say that, as a result of that conversation, all their ultra-keen doctors decide to play things safe and give their patients PSA tests and biopsies to check for prostate cancer. 

What will be the result (apart from a lot of pain and urinating problems caused by the biopsies)? The result will be that third of the men will be found to have prostate cancer. Yes, that is correct. Autopsy studies consistently show that prostate cancer is regularly found in men who die of other causes, who never even knew they had cancer until their dying day. You can see one recent piece of such research here. 

So one in three men over the age of 50 have prostate cancer. But prostate cancer accounts for just one in 20 deaths. Put the two together, and the campaign to get all men to start addressing prostate cancer doesn’t add up.

If a million of men go to the doctor as the result of your campaign, a few may have their lives saved by early investigation. But the lives of many thousands will be wrecked with impotence, incontinence, pain and anxiety as a result of unnecessary testing and treatments.

That isn’t a good solution.

What we need are better screening techniques, better ways of differentiating the tiger cancers from the pussycats. I know that your profile-raising work will help raise money to do just that, and that’s very good news. But please don’t make out, as Movember and Prostate Cancer UK are fond of doing, that the answer to prostate cancer is to get men to talk to their doctors about getting tested. It creates as many problems as it solves. Maybe one day, when the tools are there to do something useful, but not now.

My second point will have to wait for another day. Thank you for listening.

Simon

Episode 8: the blood begins to flow

The story so far... in the midst of following an international trail of subterfuge, agent John Drake has found himself pursued by doctors and dragged down by unexpected suspicions of lurking disease. Now he has awoken in a strange hospital, with no idea how he got there...

Sinner Photography/Foter.com/CC-BY-NC

“There, I think that’s enough blood,” Nurse Cooper held up the full syringe to the light.

“I want to leave please.” Drake struggled to raise himself from the bed. His legs still failed to respond.

“You are free to leave at any time,” said Nurse Cooper with a smile as she decanted the crimson fluid into specimen containers. 

“Well, give me a hand then.”

“I’m sorry, I can’t do that. It would mean I was abetting you – defying the wishes of the doctors. I can’t go against the wishes of the doctors. We’d all like you to stay.”

“Why?”

“We’d like you to be well.” Nurse Cooper smiled her bland smile again. 

Drake flumped back onto the pillows. He was powerless, and he lay there inwardly fuming. He heard the sharp tap of footsteps echoing down the white corridor, and then a dark and familiar figure appeared at the nurse’s side.

“Dr Sixsmith! Finally someone who can inject some sanity. Please will you get me out of here.” 

Drake’s GP patted him on the arm. “Sorry to see you here old chap,” said Dr Sixsmith. “But the thing is, it’s the best place for you. We need to get to the bottom of why you collapsed yesterday. It’s also an opportunity to follow up on those abnormal readings we were getting for your prostate, cholesterol, blood sugar, blood pressure...”

“Abnormal? What do you mean abnormal? You told me they were nothing to worry about.”

“Yes, but they were still outside the normal range. They might indicate arterial problems for example. Now be a good fellow, sit tight and we’ll soon have you as right as rain. Be seeing you.”

He turned to go, and as he did so took Nurse Cooper aside. “Nurse, would you mind trotting along to the Director. Tell him that Bed Number 6 is settling in fine, but we may need to make to accommodate him for a few days. We want to make sure he’s well. Would you mind passing on those words?”

Nurse Cooper nodded eagerly.

Why aren't apples more tempting? Adam speaks

It’s so simple if you look at the research. An Oxford University study, published in the British Medical Journal, has concluded that eating an apple a day could save as many lives in the over 50s as a daily statin.

Regular readers of Danger Man’s Doctor will already be aware of our interest in brocolli, and apple is as noble a variety of vegetation. Readers will also be aware of our curiosity that, while everyone bemoans the nation’s stubborn refusal to eat more of said brassicas and fruits, no one stops to ask why we won’t do as we’re told. 

The Oxford University study is a case in point. “We could all benefit from simply eating more fruit,” says study author Dr Adam Brook wistfully, in the face of evidence that one in ten of us can’t even manage one portion of fruit and veg a day.

If people did ask why we aren’t listening, they might find some answers quite quickly. Strong clues came in two news stories published in the past fortnight.

First, a study in the Journal of Consumer Research found that we remember the least when we feel most threatened. If information makes us worried, our brain’s first response is to blank it. 

The researchers used the example of breast cancer awareness campaigns: an advertisement dwelling on women’s vulnerability to the disease is likely to make them feel threatened, and the prevention message is more likely to be forgotten.

As we’ve said before on this blog, scaring people about health doesn’t work. We freeze like rabbits in the glaring headlights of our impending mortality, and can only move on by forgetting we ever heard the message.

The second enlightening news story was that drug giant GlaxoSmithKline has announced it will stop paying doctors to promote its drugs at medical conferences. Amazing that it ever happened at all isn’t it? 

What this tells us is that getting an accurate picture of what’s good for us – not a simple prospect in itself – is made much more difficult by commerce weighting the answers we get. Industry funds research about industry’s products – which is why there’s a wealth of evidence showing the benefits of statins, but hardly any research showing the benefits of apples. Why would drug companies fund research into apples? Why would multinational food companies for that matter? Until someone comes up with a body of research about apples that compares with the vast amount invested in for statins, doctors are not going to be prescribing fruit.

It’s not really our fault that we don’t behave sensibly when it comes to our health. It’s the result of health information campaigns being based on how we’d like humans to be, rather than how we actually are. And it’s the result of industry simply having too much clout in determining what doctors tell us and what foods are allowed to seduce us.  

Bad gen on the antigen

I’m a loyal follower of The Times: I worked for it for 14 years. I’m also a great supporter of prostate cancer support and research: my father died of the condition.

So you’d have thought I’d be rejoicing about the fact that this year The Times Christmas Appeal is supporting Prostate Cancer UK. But I’m not. Why?

Because it seems the charity is using this wonderful opportunity to raise money for research, to promote messages about prostate cancer which are unhelpful and possibly damaging.

This week the journal Biomarkers in Medicine pointed to the shortcomings of the PSA (prostate specific antigen) test in diagnosing prostate cancer or indicating its aggression. It highlighted the need to find new biomarkers that would provide doctors with a genuinely useful test – one that wouldn’t throw up vast numbers of false positives, and expose men to tests and treatments that could leave them unnecessarily impotent, incontinent or in pain. Such a test currently does not exist.

The prostate specific antigen. Pic: EAS 

Yet here in the same week is Owen Sharp, Chief Executive of Prostate Cancer UK, quoted in an article in The Times to launch the appeal:

“Low awareness of the PSA test means that lives may be lost every single day because men don’t know what is already available to them,” he said.

“We know that GPs are turning men away and talking them out of it. It’s not the majority but it’s about one in eight. Some of them don’t believe in the PSA test. We have calls from men about this all the time and I spoke to a man last week who had a stand-up row with his GP to get the test. We need to be very clear that having had the conversation, it is men’s choice and they shouldn’t be turning men away.”

A more responsible approach might be to support GPs who are not rushing men into having a potentially damaging test; to make clear that the PSA test is the bluntest of instruments; to stress that this is exactly why all of us need to support the quest for a new test.

Thankfully, Rosemary Bennett, the Times journalist who wrote the piece, had the sense to put Sharp’s words into context with comment from GPs about the dangers of PSA testing.

And they say it’s journalists who over-simplify...