This forum is for the discussion of anything to do with Prostate Cancer. There are only four rules:
No fundraisers, no commercials (although it is OK to recommend choices of treatment or medical people based on your personal research; invitations to participate in third-party surveys are also acceptable, provided there is no compensation to YANA);
No harvesting e-mail addresses for Spam;
No insults or flaming - be polite and respectful at all times and understand that there may be a variety of points of view, all of which may have some validity;
Opinions are OK, but please provide as much factual evidence as possible for any assertions that you are making
Failure to abide by these simple rules will result in the immediate and permanent suspension of your posting privileges.
Since this is an International Forum, please specify your location in your post.
Sorry about the bad coding for Henk's message, Don. I should have picked that up, although the link to the exchange worked! This is what the relevant part of his message was:
Forget about early detection, just wait for symptoms which in the huge majority will never arise and if so can be treated with either hormones or TURP.
Some tumors behave agressive from the early onset and are deadly, they cannot be cured by local therapies
As pointed in the article as well it is impossible with blind random biopsies to separate the tigers from pussycats, since the sample is not representative of whats really in there. Undergrading and overgrading are huge as compared with RP specimens
As to me. The brief summary of relevant issues is:
1. July 2007:PSA over 40. Nuclear bone scan showed an area 'suspicious for metastasis' on my spine. It is near some other old damage and although I thought it may well refer to that, the radiologist was adamant that was not the case and a second MRI some three months later showed, so he said, a signficant change in volume. So I started on Zoladex in Sept 2007. My PSA dropped nicely.
2. August 2008. I got my latest PSA result - 0.17 ng/ml - almost 12 years to the day of my initial diagnosis. I decided to stop Zoladex.
3. April 2010. My PSA had climbed steadily to 8.2 ng/ml - just 1.0 ng/ml more than it was back in 1996!! My oncologist said again "Don't worry - wait at least until it hits 40 again." But I chickened out and started Zoladex again in June 2010.
4. December 2011. My PSA had started to rise in January and was now 15.5. I had another nuclear bone scan (I hate those) which was clear! Was that because it was badly done (my view) or because the lesion had disappeared - doctrs' views!! After discussing a number of options I reluctantly accepted the (new) oncologist's advice to add Casodex to the medication.
5. The Casodex didn't do much - dropped PSA back to about 6 until July when it started rising, hitting 15.5 in October when we agreed to stop Casodex to see what that effect might be - it is a strange thing that stopping Casodex is sometimes associated with a drop in PSA.
With hindsight, would I add Casodex again? I don't think so because it turned out to do nothing really except possibly add marginally to the muddled thinking and other (minor) aspects of the consequences of ADT.
I am moving more to going it alone, as I did for the first ten years and doing what I feel is right for me (which may be supported by SOME doctors - a minority probably) as opposed to what the majority would want me to do. I remember reading years ago a quote that I found amusing "Views held by the majority are almost always wrong." Doesn't that sound hubristic:-)
