The Big Scare: The Business of Prostate Cancer

by Anthony Horan and Dr Anthony Horan

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1585011193
• ISBN13: 9781585011193
• Release Date: August 2009
• Publisher: Frederick Fell Publishers
• Length: 237 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.9" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

An Important Book

This book is a must-read if you have been diagnosed with prostate cancer. Following its advice just might preserve your quality of life--and possibly even save your life. As Dr. Horan so eloquently illustrates, the business of prostate cancer is largely just that--a business and an industry. As The New York Times pointed out in an article recently, this is not only a business, it is big, BIG business. The industry's products range from the $25-a-pop PSA test that can add $10,000 a year in income to a doctor's practice, to the $2500 biopsy, to the $25,000 surgery and/or radiation "options," to the ultimate in prostate cancer treatment--the proton beam generator that is the size of two football fields and costs $100,000 to play. According to the Times article, prostate cancer treatment is one of the two or three things that are leading the way in driving up the cost of health care in the United States right now. Apparently it is completely out of control. I have read a dozen or so books on prostate cancer and, with the exception of this one, most of them are selling something--one form or another of radical treatment. Celebrity urologists/surgeons/authors (with their celebrity patients) have a lot at stake in preserving the status quo. So do the big university hospitals, the pharmaceutical companies, and the labs that process all those test results. Most of these books downplay the often disastrous side effects of surgery and radiation. But even more dishonestly, what they don't tell you is that more often than not the treatments are entirely unnecessary. As my 90-year-old uncle (and retired doctor) once told me, most men will die WITH prostate but not FROM it. He's known he has prostate cancer for 25 years now and he simply watches it. Same with my 89-year-old father. Both men are still very active. Dr. Horan, a 70-something practicing urologist in California, blows the whistle on this big business. From what I've gathered from Googling and YouTubing, he apparently became alarmed about this over-treatment several years ago and reached out to some of his colleagues in the New York City-based House of Medicine, to borrow a phrase from another excellent book, "Hippocrates' Shadow." He was ignored. I'll leave it to other more competent reviewers to expound on the actual content of this book. All I want to say is that I read it with a highlighter--and almost every page is marked up. This is an important book. I do have a few complaints, though. While much of the book is written in easy-to-understand language, Dr. Horan frequently slips into using too many big words. I'm a reasonably well-educated person, but I often had to refer to a dictionary while reading it. It also would be helpful if the book had an index. Finally, my overall impression is that Dr. Horan (or his publisher) couldn't decide who the book's audience should be--the layperson, or all of those people in the medical establishment that he is bucking up against. Much of the book is just