September is Prostate Cancer Awareness Month and I am thinking what we can do to really shake things up — to make people really *want* to participate and help wipe out this disease once and for all. We need to shock people into AWARENESS!!!.
What a scandal it is that a doctor speaking about PC before an audience of his peers, had to start out by saying:
“I want you all to know that prostate cancer is not a trivial disease”.
“Trivial?” Tell that to the 30,000 men who die each year from PC .
Not only is PC a lethal disease, but contrary to public perception, it strikes younger men as well. Just browsing in some of the online PC forums today I noticed two new members of the “club”, one aged 41 and the other 51. This latter man is suffering from very advanced PC — his PSA is around 1150. And not long ago I had a woman write me that her husband was recently diagnosed with PC (at age 40), just when they had planned to start a family. So contrary to what people think, this couple were concerned with fertility issues, not retirement planning.
Recently the “PC screening controversy” reared its head again in the news. You must know that some cancer organizations, governmental entities and prominent doctors feel that PSA testing is a bad thing. I’m not going to get into the meat and potatoes of that argument. But I want to point out that in all these PC studies, the authors speak in generalities. For example, “Most men will die of some other cause” — likely in old age. The problem is, as one doctor wrote in her blog, “they leave out the subtleties“. In this case “the subtleties” are the men who suffer and die from PC, many of them in young or middle age.
These are the “Invisible Men“, because the medical establishment has written them off and the world doesn’t even know they EXIST.
I can tell you that, when my husband was diagnosed with