Younger Men Afflicted. Treatments That Do More Harm Than good. Change is Needed!

 

It often seems as if prostate cancer is just a side effect of being a healthy male and getting older. Oh, and you have this reproductive gland that causes issues. Unfortunately, now it’s younger and younger men that are being afflicted with more aggressive PCa. I was 52 when I was diagnosed seven years ago, Gleason eight/mets.

But these days it’s not at all uncommon for me to read comments or get emails through my blog from men in their 40s who have very aggressive cancers. This is no longer an “old man’s“ disease. The statistics bear that out over the last 20 to 30 years. Indeed, the incidence of PCa in men (boys! BOYS!) age 15-40 is increasing at a rate of about 2% a year.

I’m a firm believer that one must look outside the proverbial box. 

What Western medicine has had to offer, at least up until recently, has always been slice/dice, fry or castrate, either figuratively or literally.

That must change. You can’t take a 45 (or 52...or 60, etc) year old man who is quite healthy, take away his testosterone, make him incontinent, make him impotent, weaken his bones, take away his muscle, give him hot flashes, make him extraordinarily emotional and subject him to all the horrors, mental as well as physical, that go with either surgery, hormone deprivation or radiation and expect his body or mind to thrive. 

The approach to treating this prostate cancer must change.