Men are undergoing unnecessary treatments for prostate cancer—and paying the ultimate price

I’ve been treating prostate cancer since the beginning of my career. And I’ve been writing about the savagery involved in mainstream approaches to this incredibly common disease for nearly just as long.

Now, I’m not here to tell you that all prostate cancer is easy to manage. But for the majority of cases, it is.

And here’s a shocker: Current medical guidelines—which advise that all men receiving radiotherapy after surgery and recurrence should also receive long-term hormone therapy—might be both unnecessary and harmful.

High risk, low reward

According to some new data, long-term hormone blocking therapy is quite risky for prostate cancer patients with lower prostate specific antigens (PSAs).

In fact, over-reliance on hormone blockers greatly increased these patients’ risk of dying from other causes. Which is exactly what I learned in medical school decades ago, before American medicine really climbed into bed with Big Pharma.

This study focused specifically on men with rising PSA after radical prostatectomy. And it’s important to note that some 100,000 men have their prostates removed every year—yet another barbaric treatment that, in many cases, isn’t necessary at all.

Of these men, about a third will experience an increase in PSA, which may point to cancer recurrence. But it could also mean that there’s still healthy prostate tissue that the surgeon missed and therefore didn’t remove.

The point is that it’s quite common for PSA levels to rise after surgery… but it doesn’t necessarily mean that your cancer is back.

Nevertheless, a vast majority of these men will go on to receive radiation therapy, and then hormone therapy, which is troublesome. And according to this latest study, at least, the ones with lower PSAs face a higher risk of death—and more than triple the risk of serious heart and neurologic complications—because of it.

It’s overtreatment at its most grotesque… which is ultimately as problematic as the disease itself. (And the reason why ditching tools like the PSA test—rather than correcting overzealous doctors—won’t do a bit of good.)

A call for caution

To be clear, there’s a role for androgen deprivation therapy (ADT) in prostate cancer treatment. And I’ve always been a fan of including hormone blockers into a larger protocol… on an intermittent basis.

But I’ve seen men come to my office who were on constant hormone blockades. And guess what? After a few years, all the cells that will die from the treatment are gone… leaving only the cells that are both the strongest and the most resistant to treatment.

And that’s not even to mention the toxicity of ADT itself. Hormone therapy has a host of well-documented risks—most notably to your heart’s health.

At the very least, it can be a huge drain on your quality of life. Which means you want to be sure that it’s going to help you live longer… unless, of course, you’d prefer to hand your money to Big Pharma in exchange for zero benefit. (Or worse, an early death.)

Ultimately, that’s the main takeaway of this study: Docs need to slow down and take the time to consider who will really benefit from hormone therapy… and who won’t.

But do I expect them all to listen? Not for a second.

It’s the single biggest issue I have with modern medicine—and conventional cancer therapy, in particular. We treat patients as if we’re working from a cook book, where following the same steps in a precise manner will always yield the same results.

But clearly, this approach comes with consequences. Sometimes deadly ones. And I look forward to the day when American medicine ditches the dogma and returns to its roots—the primary dictate of which is to “first, do no harm.”

P.S. I uncovered the truth behind prostate cancer—and how you can protect yourself—in the June 2018 issue of my monthly newsletter, Logical Health Alternatives (“REVEALED: The real facts behind the latest ‘prostate panic’”). Subscribers have access to this and all of my past content. So what are you waiting for? Sign up today!

Source:

“Long-Term Hormone Therapy May Harm Prostate Cancer Subset.” Medscape Medical News, 09/17/2019. (medscape.com/viewarticle/918510)