Exploitation — it’s the only word that comes to mind here.

Even as the mainstream moves away from routine cancer screenings for men and women alike, there’s one group of Americans that are still getting screened regularly for cancers that almost certainly won’t hurt them.

And that’s the elderly.

These are the people least likely to need treatment even if a cancer is detected — and least able to withstand the traumatic surgeries, dangerous drugs, and toxic chemotherapy often used to “treat” those cancers.

But the numbers don’t lie — and the newest numbers show that 57 percent of men between the ages of 75 and 79 were screened for prostate cancer, while 42 percent of men older than 80 were actually given PSA tests.

You have to wonder what the doctors are thinking here: They know these cancers can take decades to develop, decades an 80-year-old doesn’t have. They know that even younger men have nothing to worry about in most cases. They know that the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recently recommended doing away with the PSA test altogether.

They know all this… yet they’re screening anyway, and not just men.

The same study in the Archives of Internal Medicine found that 62 percent of women between the ages of 75 and 79, and 50 percent of women older than 80 have been given mammograms over the past two years.

And if PSA exams are useless for men, mammograms are every bit as useless for women — so useless that even mainstream docs are backing away from them.

That’s because all the mammograms in the world have barely made a dent in the breast cancer death rate. These screenings have succeeded in finding harmless cancers, which then end up being treated with disfiguring surgeries and dangerous radiation.

Similarly, the study also found that 53 percent of women between 75 and 79 and 38 percent of those older than 80 were given pap smears to test for cervical cancer.

It’s ridiculous — and even the mainstream groups that normally back most cancer screenings agree. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommends ending pap smears as early as 65, while the American Cancer Society says there’s no benefit after the age of 70.

In reality, many of these screenings have no benefit at any age. But for seniors, many of whom are already fighting health issues, these screenings, biopsies, and inevitable cancer treatments can turn the golden years into a living nightmare.

Skip ‘em — because in this case, what you don’t know almost certainly won’t hurt you.

It’s like a nightmare, except you never get to wake up: A drug used during a common back procedure has been linked to cancer — including one of the deadliest forms of the disease on the planet.

That drug is Infuse, which is supposed to stimulate bone growth after a spinal fusion procedure.

It’s already been linked to everything from infection to sterility — but now, a leading researcher finds that high doses of the drug can boost the odds of cancer by 2.5 times in the first year alone, and by 500 percent in the three years after the procedure.

Dr. Eugene Carragee, editor-in-chief of Spine Journal, told the North American Spine Society that these cancers include breast and prostate cancer — and believe it or not, that’s the good news.

After all, you can fight those cancers and win (although it would be outright insane to deliberately boost your risk of either).

That bad news: The drug was also linked to pancreatic cancer — the same cancer that killed Steve Jobs and claims nearly 95 percent of all patients within five years.

Dr. Carragee said the risk seemed to be greater for Amplify, a high-dose version of Infuse that was rejected by the FDA earlier this year over cancer concerns.

Hey, every now and then the agency gets one right — but in this case, it didn’t matter. If docs want Amplify, all they have to do is up the dose of Infuse — and many of them have been doing just that.

What makes this so much worse is that all of it could have been avoided — because there’s evidence that the researchers behind the studies that were used to get Infuse approved turned a blind eye to its side effects.

As I told you before, these researchers claimed the drug was practically risk-free — and many of those same researchers were also collecting millions of dollars from Medtronic, the company that makes Infuse.

A coincidence? You decide.

A more recent look at the data — including the data from the trials that supposedly found that drug to be so safe — found that up to 50 percent of patients given Infuse experience side effects such as infection, bone loss and excess bone growth.

And for men, the drug may also come with a risk of both sterility and a horrific condition called retrograde ejaculation.

That last one is exactly what it sounds like: You ejaculate backwards, into your bladder instead of out the penis.

There’s no alternative to Infuse — if you need a spinal fusion, just go without. Or better yet, find a way to avoid the surgery in the first place — because you might not even need the procedure at all.

You might think medical guidelines are based on years of clinical evidence and gold-standard research. After all, doctors use them every single day to make life-or-death decisions.

In reality, they’re based on the whims and fancies of the medical elite… and that’s especially true when it comes to women’s health.

A new study finds that nearly a third of 717 practice recommendations issued by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists are based solely on expert opinions — with another 38 percent driven by the kind of weak observational studies I’m always warning you to take with a grain of salt.

All told, just 30 percent of the guidelines obediently followed by 50,000+ ACOG doctors are based on gold-standard clinical trials.

That’s it.

In other words, there’s not a lot of “evidence” in the “evidence-based medicine” touted by the mainstream. But it does help answer some of the questions I’ve had about ACOG.

This is, after all, the same group that issued a defiant new call for more frequent mammograms — despite solid evidence that those screenings have led to the mass overtreatment of benign tumors. (Read about that here.)

Those guidelines have punished a generation of women with disfiguring mastectomies and toxic radiation — but as I’ve told you before, they’ve barely made a dent in the breast cancer death rate. (Read the story here.)

ACOG isn’t the only group issuing guidelines despite a lack of clinical evidence to back them up: One study earlier this year found that six out of seven guidelines issued by the Infectious Diseases Society of America had no solid research behind them.

That’s why docs were told to pump patients full of antibiotics the moment they even suspected pneumonia in a patient — a practice that fueled the overuse of the meds and helped breed drug-resistant superbugs… without actually improving outcomes.

And in even more outrageous cases, guidelines are written under the watchful eye of “experts” with a direct financial stake in the outcome — like many of those issued by the American Heart Association and American College of Cardiology between 2003 and 2008. (Read about it here.)

Put it all together, and the sad reality is that the deck is stacked against you before you even set foot in the doctor’s office — and that’s why whenever your doctor gives you a treatment, you need to stop and ask him why before you follow his orders.

I’ll have more on the questions you need to ask during any trip to a doctor later this week.

A new spin on mammograms has managed to take a badly flawed technology… and make it even worse.

Imagine that!

The technology is called computer-aided detection, or CAD, and it’s supposed to help radiologists find potential cancers in breast tissue — which would be great if it actually worked.

In reality, all it seems good for is giving women a good scare. That’s because this “advanced technology” is great at detecting “abnormalities” — but not so great at detecting actual cancer.

If you want proof, take a look at the data from a study published in Journal of the National Cancer Institute. Researchers looked at data on 1.6 million mammograms given over an eight-year span. They found that even though CAD revealed more “abnormalities,” the rate of invasive breast cancers that were detected remained the same — whether CAD was used or not.

Clinics with CAD also had a lower rate of accurate diagnoses of “abnormal” mammograms than clinics without the technology.

And, for the cherry on top, clinics with CAD had a higher rate of false positives — which meant that more women had to undergo additional tests, when none of it would have been necessary to begin with.

The same team carried out a similar study in 2007 with similar results — so if anything, CAD is consistent.

Consistently bad.

Despite that lousy track record, CAD is now widely used. If you’ve had a mammogram recently, chances are your own radiologist used CAD.

The obvious answer is for radiologists to give CAD the boot. But even if they did, there’s a bigger picture to keep in mind.

CAD or no CAD, mammograms are dangerously overused and wildly inaccurate — and they’ve led to the mass overtreatment of a disease that won’t hurt most women.

The radiation used in mammograms alone can cause the very cancers they’re supposed to detect. Even mainstream mammogram backers will be forced to admit it if you ask them directly (expect some hems and haws first, though).

Instead of tweaking this failed screening, it’s time to scrap it altogether and find one that really works instead.