by Dr. Alan Inglis

It’s bad enough that Big Pharma has brainwashed Americans into thinking they need a prescription drug every time they get sick – now the billion-dollar giants are going after healthy people, too.

A group of doctors from the American Society for Clinical Oncology and the American Urological Association are recommending that perfectly healthy men consider taking the prescription drug finasteride (also sold as Proscar) to prevent prostate cancer. Finasteride is already commonly used to treat enlarged prostates and urinary problems.

This recommendation is not only wrong… it’s downright foolhardy.

First, according to the research, 71 men would need to take the drug for seven years to prevent a single case of prostate cancer. That’s an enormous cost – and this "preventative medicating" will probably not be covered by insurance. Plus, that’s an awful lot of men who will have to suffer through finasteride’s side effects – which include loss of sexual desire – for absolutely no benefit.

What makes even less sense is that the authors are only recommending the drug be considered by men who are regularly getting PSA tests for prostate cancer. Why they’re limiting the recommendation to this group, I still don’t fully understand. But suffice to say, the PSA test is considered so flawed, that even many major cancer research groups don’t recommend it.

I was at a loss when I first saw these new recommendations published… but it didn’t take me long to figure it out. Turns out, some of the doctors who wrote the guidelines have consulted with Merck, which makes Proscar, and GlaxoSmithKline, which makes another drug being tested to see if it prevents prostate cancer.

Fortunately, there are some doctors speaking up and questioning whether these guidelines make much sense. Like me, they point out that prostate cancer is often so slow-growing, that most men who get it die of something else first. Aggressive treatment, such as surgery, typically doesn’t make much sense… and putting millions of men on a drug to prevent prostate cancer doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, either.

That’s just common sense… but unfortunately for Big Pharma, there’s no profit in that.