Photo: AFP
The news that former President Joe Biden has stage four prostate cancer has been met with nearly equal portions of sympathy and disbelief. At the core of his case, most people can’t believe that the one-time leader of the free world has such an aggressive form of cancer, because that implies that he has had the disease for quite a while. What exactly does a stage four diagnosis mean, and what does Biden do now to treat his condition? Dr. Gil Lederman, who can be heard regularly on WOR, is the cancer specialist who brought body radiosurgery to America and has treated thousands of patients since he began his practice in New York. He appeared on 710 WOR’s Mendte in the Morning program to offer his expert opinion on what brought Biden’s health to this state.
“Okay, so, he has a Gleason 9 cancer,” Dr. Lederman explained to host Larry Mendte. “[The Gleason scale is] a scale from 2-10, and it’s based on two different areas of the prostate that get biopsied, and they add it up… Gleason 9 is just about the worst cancer as far as aggression that one can possibly have, so that’s issue number one. Issue number two is that he has stage four cancer… four is metastatic; that means it’s got into the blood stream, most commonly, and it has traveled. So, for his prostate cancer to go from the prostate to the bone, it means it got into the blood stream and it’s traveling, which also means it’s not curable.”
Dr. Lederman was most shocked, however, that Biden supposedly last a PSA test for prostate cancer done in 2014. “You have laws against age discrimination, yet here’s a man whose doctors maybe abided by guidelines that say, oh, he’s 70, he’s over the hill- here’s a President of the United States; we spend billions of dollars protecting him, and no one could do a five-dollar test to detect this cancer early.”
Photo Credit: Getty Images