Jim’s Prostate Cancer 101

Become informed. Find an informed oncologist, urologist or interventional radiologist who does not dispute any statements below. Treatment and prevention advances occur constantly, a process emerging artificial Intelligence (AI) application will only accelerate.

Be ready to ask your doctor questions you learned here. Most primary care doctors are almost forced to refer prostate cancer patients to doctors within their referral network unless you specifically ask for more.

Commonly accepted ‘standards of care’ change. Beware of doctors who have not kept up. When I was diagnosed with a Gleason 7 in 1999 America’s most revered prostate cancer surgeon refused to treat patients with Gleason ratings above 6. My oncologist told me most doctors who radiate or do surgery on patients with Gleason 6s and stable PSAs below 10 today could be sued for malpractice.

Tens of thousands of men are still getting DUPED by old school thinking doctors. The EUPROMS (Europe Oomo Patient Reported Outcome Study) indicates:

• Mainstream treatments can even affect men’s bowels. (Defecate)
• 67% of men report leakage after surgery. 48% report leakage after radiation. (Urinate)
• 85+% of men report sexual problems after surgery or radiation. (Penetrate)
• 100% of men are not able to Ejaculate after surgery or radiation. (DUPE)

Do not be DUPEd. Traditional surgery and radiation approaches of all varieties make little or no difference. Again, don’t take my word. Look at the New England Journal of Medicine’s July 2012 article (linked below).

Focal treatments, HiFU or MRI guided laser, are the way to go for patients who insist on having their cancer tumors removed.

It is my opinion (I am not giving medical advice!) PCa patients who have a stable PSAs less than 10 may not need any treatment. And there are many things a patient can do to reduce the risk their PCa will cause problems.

If your PSA goes above 10, radiology imaging still leaves you worried, and you were biopsied, request a risk assessment called CAPRA. CAPRA combines measures for PSA, Gleason biopsy rating, and tumor stage. Why?  PSA readings alone often led to undeniable over- treatment. CAPRA has saved thousands of us from DUPEing. Furthermore, it is possible to know if cancer has even spread outside the prostate by using PSMA or C11 imaging to better stage men’s PCa since such imaging ‘lights up’ fatty acid producing tumors.

The American Academy of Family Physicians advises member doctors to not even run patients’ PSA tests unless they commit to serve as PCa patients’ gatekeepers so they can safeguard patients against unwarranted treatments that prostate specialists commonly use.

Thankfully, doctors are gradually ‘getting it’. The percentage of PCa men delaying or avoiding mainstream treatments (Watchful waiting or Active Surveillance) has risen from 25% to 60+%, effectively reducing DUPEing.

My personal history is available on this book’s website (ridingthescalpel.com). It covers 18+ years of COMG (Compassionate Oncology Medical Group) care. I’ve had PSAs from 0.01 to 25.3. (Today I’m at 0.4). An informed doctor can see how my COMG doctors adjusted my treatments through the years.

Abstract: Recent experiments have shown that estradiol is the primary cause of prostate cancer. Since estradiol in men is produced by the action of aromatase on testosterone, testosterone is only the secondary cause of prostate cancer. In normal prostate epithelial cells estradiol causes mitosis, whereas testosterone prevents mitosis.

Estradiol is mutagenic through the formation of depurinating estrogen–DNA adducts 4-OHE1(E2)-1-N3Ade and 4-OHE1(E2)-1-N7Gua. For decades, doctors have been taught that testosterone is the primary cause of prostate cancer. This misunderstanding has not only been believed by the medical profession, but by the general public as well.

As a result of this, too few researchers are exploring the therapeutic uses of testosterone in treating prostate cancer, funding requests are being denied due to the ignorance of funding reviewers, and volunteers for being treated with testosterone are hard to find.

The solution to all of these problems is to educate the medical profession and the general public about the true relationship between testosterone, estradiol, and prostate cancer.

Below is the conclusion paragraph of the 7/19/12 New England Journal off Medicine epidemiology prostate cancer article. Its conclusion is consistent with a 1995 Swedish study. Neither supports the efficacy of localized Prostate Cancer prostatectomy treatments. To our knowledge there has not been any evidence brachytherapy has better mortality results than radical prostatectomy.

In conclusion, our study showed that, as compared with observation, radical prostatectomy did not significantly reduce all-cause or prostate-cancer mortality through at least 12 years among men with clinically localized prostate cancer that had been diagnosed in the era of PSA testing.

Absolute differences in mortality between the study groups were less than 3 percentage points. Subgroup analyses suggested that surgery might reduce mortality among men with higher PSA values and possibly among men with higher-risk tumors, but not among men with PSA levels of 10 ng per milliliter or less or among men with low-risk tumors.