My good friend and fellow advocate Mike Scott (Prostate Cancer Info Link) introduced me to a new web site produced by the University of Chicago called Cost of Care (www.CostofCare.org). The site is designed around the novel idea that the cost we must pay for our cancer care has become another negative side effect or [...]
Clinical trials are vital if we expect to continue to see improvements in the treatments and medications that are available. Unfortunately, there are some historical abuses in clinical trials so many people do approach them with a level of distrust. In contemporary times the clinical trial system has many safeguards that did not exist even [...]
In an online article published Friday, November 6, 2015 Dr. David Crawford raises some very serious questions about how we standardly use hormone therapy (ADT) in the treatment of men with advanced prostate cancer. He claimed that not only is it vital for initial positive outcomes, it is vital for the successful use of the [...]
It has been long assumed that hormone therapy (ADT) used in the treatment of men with advanced prostate cancer increases a man’s risk for developing potentially live threatening thromboembolic disease (formation in a blood vessel of a clot (thrombus) that breaks loose and is carried by the blood stream to plug another vessel. The clot [...]
The Response Evaluation Criteria In Solid Tumors (RECIST) was first published in 2000 and then updated in 2009. RECIST is a set of published rules that attempt to define when cancer tumors, including prostate cancer tumors, improve ("respond"), stay the same ("stabilize"), or worsen ("progress") during treatment. This criteria has become very important as the majority [...]
Understanding a little about the prostate gland and its biology is not only interesting, but it allows us to ask some important questions that can be very specific to our prostate cancer treatment decisions and our eventual outcomes from these decisions. It also can simply add to the confusion we all face in making the [...]
Clinical trials are used to both demonstrate that a drug or treatment has efficacy (extends life or improves the quality of life). They also are used as the vehicle to obtain approval from the governmental body responsible for monitoring and approving their use. How the trial is set up will directly dictate the eventual approved [...]
Go to any support group meeting and you are almost sure to hear someone, usually a new member of the group, ask about what they might do to lower their risk of having their prostate cancer progress or even lower their risk of dying from the prostate cancer. Among the common answer to this question [...]
So, you are a hero and have decided to participate in a clinical trial. We all are deeply in your debt, so I want to start out and extend to you a very big thank you. Making that decision to participate in a clinical trial isn’t an easy decision for anyone. Participating in a trial [...]
Today the vast majority of us have access to a computer as well as the Internet. Thanks to powerful search engines we all have easy access to the world, including to an explosion of information about our health. The fact that you are reading this blog is the best example I could offer. However, in [...]
