Reflection Prostate Cancer, Book Review Example

Questions for Speaker

There are two questions for the speaker Richard O’Kennedy. The first question for the instructor is “What percentage of patients has been diagnosis with cancer using the PSA test? The second question” How effective is the PSA in identifying cancer. It has been noted that the PSA is not a cancer-specific market. Can you share your thoughts on whether the PSA is an ineffective test?

Reflection Diagnostic Test and PSA Test

The presentation was informative based on a medical clinical point of view of Richard O’ Kennedy. However, the current prostate treatments and success rates and the price of the tests are in question.  The PSA test has lost its value because it cannot detect pre-cancerous cells or conditions, however, the diagnostic test are well worth the price to find the deadly cancer.

There are six primary treatments for prostate problems and five of them include the words “Cancer” (Cancer Treatment Centers of America):

1. Prostate-Specific Antigen Blood Test:
2. Prostate Ultrasound and Biopsy
3. Cystoscopy
4. CAT Scans
5. MRI’s

The tests above are tools for a physician or specialist to find cancerous cells. The PSA Digital exam is a test to determine the presence of cancer cells. The medical community should address the lack of alternatives to the PSA test. There are reports that men take the PSA for years, yet they still end up with the deadly cancer, which laid dormant.

Personal Reflection

Screening tests have tremendous value but are most often priced at a fraction of the price of a diagnostic. The main logic behind this general standard is that since screening tests are applied to numerous individuals to identify the likelihood of a patient depicting precursors to a disease, they are expected to be cheaper. This is because any need for screening tests have to financially justified as they are only performed on patients who have a considerable risk of developing precursor symptoms to a condition, like cancer. On the other hand, diagnostic tests are performed on patients that already depict symptoms of a given disease. In such situations, the need for accurate diagnosis justifies the application of higher costs.

This logic makes sense as the difference in pricing reflects the accuracy of the strategies employed. Diagnostic tests are usually geared towards realizing high specificity, where the patients acceptance of the test and its results is of no effect to the quality and standard of the results (Cancer Treatment Centers of America). Furthermore, diagnostic procedures are more likely to be invasive and as such would require more complex equipment and material. This necessitates the application of higher prices on diagnostic tests. Since the results of screening tests are set to realize sensitivity, numerous results tend to be false positives. The lack of accuracy does not justified higher prices, as such these procedures should be priced at a fraction of the price of diagnostic tests.

Works Cited

Cancer Treatment Centers of America. Prostate cancer decoded : newer life-saving prostate cancer treatments. New York: Morgan Jones Publishing, 2008. Print.

O’Kennedy, Richard. Prostate Cancer: a significant problem for Biomedical Diagnostics – Issues and their Potential Resolution. Biomedical Diagnostic Institute, 2015. Eelectronic Source.