Finding prostate cancer early can save your life or unleash a torrent of unnecessary misery. To test or not to test? It's a question dividing the medical community and one that only you should answer.
Richard S. is lying unconscious and naked on a stainless-steel operating table. Breathing and gastroesophageal tubes converge at his mouth, and a catheter protrudes from his penis. A physician's assistant places his feet in boots that spread his legs and force his knees to bend. Then the foot of the table drops away, providing room for a million-dollar surgical machine called the da Vinci robot to "dock."
"I just want it out," Richard told me, just before the anesthesia took hold. "It" is his prostate gland, which a biopsy has shown carries a small amount of cancer that could conceivably, one day in the distant future, kill him. "I've heard that many more men die with prostate cancer than from it," he said. "But I don't want to have to worry. I intend to live to be over 100."
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