Daniel Nixon - The Prostate Health Program: A Guide To Preventing And Controlling Prostate Cancer

M AX G OMEZ, P H. D., H EALTH E DITOR, WNBC

Hows your prostate? What do you think it will be like in five years? In ten? In fact, as long as Im askinghows your health in general? How is your cholesterol? Your blood pressure? Your PSA?

Sound a little nosy? Even rude? Sort of like asking what your bank balance is or whether youll be able to afford to retire at age sixty-five or put your kids through college. I would never dream of asking about your private finances, but Ill bet you have at least a pretty good idea of how much you have in the bank. You may even read money magazines, newsletters, follow the stock market, or get financial advice from friends or professional advisors. But Id be willing to bet just as much that you dont know your blood pressure, cholesterol, or, since this book is about prostate health, your PSA number.

Most men are serious about providing for the financial needs of themselves and their family. But when it comes to their personal health, their level of concern or interest is nowhere near the same. How many men subscribe to health newsletters or confer with nutritionists, never mind see their doctors regularly? Think about the financial straits your family would be left in should you develop a serious illness or, God forbid, die from a disease that could have been treated and even prevented! When you consider what you mean to your family, maybe you should be paying more attention to your health; at the very least, it should be as much as you pay to your finances.

In the United Statesa country with some of the best doctors, hospitals, and medicine in the worldthe majority of men never visit a doctor regularly. For many men, years can go by without their having their blood pressure taken, cholesterol checked, or urine analyzed. Men in America dont go to the doctor until they are sick, figuring that if it aint broke, dont fix it. The trouble is, this attitude is like closing the barn door after the horse is gone. By that I mean that, often, by the time you get sick enough to force you to go to the doctor, there may be precious little a doctor can do to help. The problem may have been treatable or even preventable had you gone sooner; but in a later stage, treatments may be painful, devastating, or may not be able to fix the problem.

Remember the old Geritol commercial slogan that proclaimed, When youve got your health, youve got just about everything? Sounds trite, but its really true. When youre sick, nothing else matters; when youre healthy, everything else is possible. The fact is that the single most important thing a man can do to provide for the security of his familyboth financial and emotionalis to take care of his health. Caring for your family means caring for your health, pure and simple.

But visiting a doctor is only one part of taking control of your health. An equally important part is learning everything you can about preserving your health with preventive carelearning about the foods and nutrients that enhance your health as well as the substances that can harm it. The dirty little secret no one wants to talk about when it comes to health is that most of the diseases Western man dies of are largely self-inflicted. I know this sounds like blaming the victim, but we have to own up to the fact that the heart attack or cancer we suffer from at age sixty probably had its roots in the cheeseburgers we were eating (and other bad habits we were practicing) throughout our twenties, thirties, and beyond.

But lets get back to prostate cancer, which has been a topic of special interest to me for some time. It has long struck me that men just dont take prostate cancer as seriously as women take breast cancer. Men are certainly are not as vocal about it, yet prostate cancer is very similar in terms of the numbers affected, while treatments are nowhere near as advanced as they are for breast cancer. Far more research dollars flow into breast cancer research than into prostate cancer research primarily because women have mobilized and lobbied for it. This in no way means that we have conquered breast cancer or even that we have adequate means of treating, detecting, or preventing itjust that the current state of knowledge on prostate cancer lags well behind what we know about breast cancer.

My opinion stems partly from my recent prostate cancer news segments, which have focused on such topics as:

Mobile health units that spread the word to men on this silent but often deadly disease

A recent study confirming that men who undergo vasectomies are no more likely to develop prostate cancer than men who do not