The New Yorker:

By Dhruv Khullar
Khullar is a practicing physician and writes about medicine, health care, and politics for The New Yorker.

On Sunday, Joe Biden disclosed that he has an aggressive form of prostate cancer that has spread to the bone, which means that it can be managed but not cured. The news roughly coincided with the promotion of a book whose authors argue that his inner circle engaged in misdirection, if not obfuscation, about his mental acuity near the end of his term. Sympathy quickly gave way to speculation regarding what Biden had known about his cancer, and when he’d known it. Donald Trump said that he felt “very badly,” but that “people should try and find out what happened” and that “somebody is not telling the facts.”

Prostate cancer, which kills more men than almost any other cancer, can be diagnosed with a quick blood test for a biomarker called prostate-specific antigen. Many observers were perplexed that an eighty-two-year-old man with virtually unlimited access to medical care—and about whose health there has been virtually unlimited conjecture—could have gone undiagnosed until the cancer threatened his life. It’s reasonable to wonder, Shouldn’t every man get tested, just in case? “You have to be your best advocate,” Ana Navarro, a political strategist who co-hosts ABC’s “The View,” told viewers in response to Biden’s news. “If you are over seventy and they’re telling you, ‘No P.S.A. necessary’—require a P.S.A. Make it a point.”

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