Only men have prostates, but prostate cancer (PC) often heavily involves women, too, in at least two ways. First, it will probably strike some man they hold dear. Second, getting men to the doctor often requires pressure from the women in their lives. Thus PC affects most people.
PC is the most common cancer in men, and its death rate in men is second only to that of lung cancer (partly because we need lungs, while the prostate is a non-vital gland that does much more harm than good and is thus dispensable.) Every year almost a quarter-million men are diagnosed with PC and about 30,000 die from it, partly due to late detection, statistically speaking. In our prime retirement decades, our 60s and 70s, PC will hit one in seven men. It hits black men a decade earlier and much harder than whites. Every man should begin getting the two PC tests before age 50, 40 for blacks.
The two simple, quick, painless, cheap tests for PC provide a five-year head start in detecting and curing it before symptoms appear, helping to bump its survival rate by almost 50% in just the last generation. Postponing tests until symptoms appear wastes that five-year buffer and significantly risks a needless and sometimes particularly agonizing death. Early detection and treatment often reduces PC from a major threat to their lives to a much lesser threat to the two functions of their . . . their . . . favorite organ. Modern, early PC treatment saves the lives, potence, and bladder and/or bowel control of many thousands of men who often lost one or all of those just a generation ago.
Women already believe most guys are idiots about going to the doctor. Men prove their women right if they don't drag their butts (how appropriate, as that's the subject of one of the tests) and arms (the subject of the other test) in for their annual prostate checkups. Any man near middle age who doesn't is foolish, because only if these tests catch it early is PC one of the most curable major cancers we face. Early detection is by far the best defense against PC.
Ladies, close friends . . . order your man's raggedy fanny to the doc now or risk losing him to a disease that's 97% preventable if caught early. Each test takes about 15 seconds, tops. A needle in the arm, a finger up the wazoo, and they're done. The doc gets the worst end -- literally and figuratively -- of the latter deal, so any guy who can't handle that exam is a certifiable wuss. It's a quick "Wham, bam, thank you, Sam" any real man can easily face . . . figuratively speaking. Odds are significant that if the men you know skip the exams, one of them will get PC after middle age, so he may be a dead wuss if he doesn't bend over for his health's sake long before he nears retirement. Age is the most critical risk factor in PC.
The PSA test is simply another number gleaned from the same blood sample we should give every year for routine medical exams. Men should know PSA's danger thresholds (defined below), and speak up if their PSA red flags appear. My sorry socialized medicine provider didn't, so now I have advanced PC that we can only hope is still curable. The five-year detection buffer the PSA test gives us was cut in half by his incompetence and my ignorance. I hadn't yet researched PSA levels because I trusted my doctor and didn't consider them a cooking magazine topic. I was wrong! If you love any man, are a man, and/or influence any man's diet, PC concerns you, because it strikes many men and is influenced by diet. (An anti-PC diet includes eating more fruits and vegetables, cooked tomato products, fish, and a $15 per year daily multivitamin multimineral for a small Vit E and selenium boost. Eat much less animal fat [especially red meat] and whole dairy. Take no extra zinc or calcium beyond RDAs and no flaxseed supplements. Saw palmetto is not proven to help, and suppresses PSA artificially, thus could hide cancer.)
