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Tom,
I saw a survey of doctors' attitudes towards medical treatments and doctors will generally recomend more aggressive treatment for their patients but have less aggressive treatment for themselves. When you know what the side effects are like you are willing to gamble a little on quantity of life for better quality it seems, at least for doctors.
If you are Gleason 6, low percentage of cancer, low PSA and your doctor agrees then just go with active surveillance. There will probably be far better treatments with no side effects by the time you might need it. Also, eat a prostate healthy (also known as the heart healthy)diet from now on. Try it for a year, you can always change your mind.
Thanks for the feedback Frank, I am considering just doing the AS for a while with the monitoring that goes with it. In the meantime I am looking for a better test to give me a read on the total amount of cancer in my Prostate & the aggressive nature of it.
The biopsy does a pretty good job at total amount of cancer in the prostate and the Gleason Score is not bad at determining how aggressive the cancer is. After three biopsies over a few years you will probably have as good an idea as any new techniques coming out in the next 5 years but who knows?
Remember, almost nothing is certain in cancer analysis and treatment. That is why doctors always try to avoid answering the question "how long do I have to live?"
There was a conference on AS - a first! - held earlier this month. Jon Nowlin (who has been practising AS for five years now - a third of my fifteen years) posted an excellent summary of the conference which I posted here under the header NIH conference on Active Surveillance and Dr Meyers video - there it is down below.
Although there is, as ever, a considerable disagreement among the 'experts', there seems little doubt that there is in fact a clear case for supporting active surveillance as a good decision long term for the right diagnosis.
I guess it depends how you define 'long term'. When I was diagnosed in 1996,'long term' was said to be five years!! So my fifteen year survival is a deal longer than that and I think I may make twenty if my heart condition doesn't get me first:-)
