The notion that there is ever a good time to stop looking for cancer is hard to grasp. But that’s the message delivered last week by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, which recommended that men ages 75 and older no longer be screened for prostate cancer.

As I explain in my Well column this week, the task force’s recommendations highlight the fact that there is always a downside to early detection. It’s not the simple blood test that puts men at risk, but the fact that many men have such slow-growing cancers that finding them and treating them likely does more harm than good.

I think Dr. Peter B. Bach, a pulmonologist and epidemiologist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, explained it best.

“It’s just a needle stick, but the cascade of events that follows are fairly serious,” Dr. Bach said. “I think the burden is on medicine to try and generate some evidence that the net benefits are there before drawing that tube of blood.”

To read more, check out the full Well column here.

And to learn more about the issues men with prostate cancer face, look around the Well blog for other posts on prostate cancer. In Sex After Prostate Surgery, readers talked about how statistics can mislead men trying understand how their sex lives may be changed by prostate surgery. Another post, No Answers for Men With Prostate Cancer, explained why experts can’t recommend any one treatment over another one, and often can’t say whether treatment is appropriate at all. And Cancer Funding: Does It Add Up? shows that funding for research into prostate cancer lags that of other illnesses.