VANCOUVER - Men who pay for prostrate screening tests are not being discriminated against even though women get free breast cancer screening, the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal said Thursday in a ruling it conceded would not end the public health controversy.
Lawrence Armstrong brought a complaint before the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal against the province's Health Ministry over its refusal to pay for a test known as the PSA, or prostate specific antigen, which costs about $30.
He claimed men were discriminated against on the basis of their sex because women don't have to pay for mammograms or pap smears.
But after considering several expert opinions, tribunal member Kurt Neuenfeldt dismissed the claim, citing questions about how useful the PSA test really is as a general method of screening for prostate cancer.
The Health Ministry's decision not to pay for the test is not based on sex, but on how effective PSA screening is, compared with mammograms and pap smears, said Neuenfeldt.
"This decision cannot resolve the public health controversy surrounding public funding for PSA screening, as the tribunal has neither the expertise nor jurisdiction to make such a determination," the tribunal member said in his lengthy ruling.
The ruling also said "the medical and epidemiological science as to the usefulness of PSA screening is complex and, at times, counterintuitive."
The tribunal heard from a long list of witnesses, many of them doctors, when it spent several days in 2006 hearing the case.
Armstrong, 59 at the time of the hearing with no symptoms of prostate cancer, told the hearing he has had the test done because his doctors had told him to since he was in his mid-40s.
After the lengthy testimony, Neuenfeldt determined that "the decision to fund cancer screening tests for women, but not for men, is not based on the fact Mr. Armstrong is male, but on the questionable scientific support for the efficacy of PSA screening as a population-wide screening device and its consequences."
He also said Armstrong was not subjected to "differential treatment" based on his sex but that the "differential treatment is based on the characteristics of the PSA test and its consequences."
Neuenfeldt also acknowledged he had to bow to the experts.
"I agree with the submission of the ministry that ... I should be reluctant to second-guess decisions made by experts within the scope of their specialized judgment, as long as that judgment is exercised in an non-discriminatory manner."
