Men don’t usually think of their prostate until it starts acting up.
An obscure little gland—often compared to a walnut—it lies under the bladder, quietly and thanklessly performing its endless and vital task of mixing enzymes and ingredients into the seminal plasma to allow sperm to flow freely, until one day a man may notice that he’s suddenly making trips to the toilet in the middle of the night, or that his stream just isn’t as powerful as it used to be.
For Kevin McNamara, he suddenly noticed that it was a bit of a wait and an effort to urinate in the morning, which seemed odd. He went to the doctor.
McNamara went through mainstream medicine’s prostate protocol. He had a PSA blood test (see box, page 30) and got a high reading of 6 on the scale that adjusts according to age and race. A magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan showed his prostate was enlarged, so he was scheduled for a prostate biopsy.
Biopsies are billed as being a simple 10-minute procedure that can be “uncomfortable,”but they can be excruciating—and risky, too. Doctors used to say they weren’t painful. Now they routinely use anesthetic.
A biopsy may lead to erectile dysfunction,1 and in 2 to 5 percent of biopsies, sepsis results, often requiring hospitalization.2 Questions remain about whether cancer can spread from a prostate via biopsy needle tracks, as well. A review of the risk found that so-called “tumor seeding”via the biopsy needle occurs in less than 1 percent of cases,3 but the fact that it occurs at all is still cause for concern.
To perform the biopsy, a hollow-tipped needle is inserted through the wall of the rectum to reach the prostate, and
