Traditional Treatments

Traditional treatments for prostate cancer have been available for many decades now. They have proven themselves to be effective but often carry with them the risk of serious side effects. Impotence, incontinence, radiation burns and hair loss are just some of the unintended consequences.

For this reason, researchers have worked very hard on finding alternative treatments with fewer, or at least less severe, adverse effects than their traditional counterparts.

How Advanced Is Your Cancer?

In most if not all cases, your treatment options are dictated by how advanced your cancer is. In almost all cases of prostate cancer, your chances of a full recovery are greatly improved if you catch the disease in its early stages. Where your cancer is confined only to your prostate gland, cure rates are much higher than if it has spread beyond and into the surrounding tissue.

Brachytherapy

Brachytherapy is a procedure where a number of radioactive seeds are implanted into the prostate with a syringe. Because the seeds are small, the effective area of their radioactivity is small. This confines the burning effect that radiotherapy uses to small areas immediately surrounding the implanted seed.

This procedure is effective but because it is a painful and tedious one, implanting the seeds can take as many as 40 separate injections, it requires general anesthesia. In addition, cancerous cells have been known to grow back after the procedure is completed.

Cryotherapy

Cryotherapy is a method that uses freezing to kill diseased cells. The entire prostate gland is frozen and then allowed to thaw. The cancerous cells cannot survive this process and so the tumor is killed off. It is done in a surgical environment and requires an overnight stay in hospital and a general anesthetic to put you under.

Some side effects include holes opening between the prostate and the rectum, impotence and urinary incontinence.

Hormone Therapy

Hormones are prescribed most often in men whose cancer has grown beyond their prostate gland. Altering the man's testosterone level has been proven to slow the growth of prostate cancer. It cannot cure the cancer or destroy the cancerous cells but it can sometimes improve a patient's lifestyle and slow the rate of cancer growth.

Unfortunately, most men develop a resistance to the effectiveness of the treatment after about 2 years. It is therefore only a temporary solution.

HIFU

HIFU stands for high intensity focused ultrasound. It is a procedure that uses focused sound waves to heat and destroy cancerous cells.

Using an MRI, any diseased cells are identified and then targeted with a pulse of focused ultrasound. The pulse heats the targeted area to as high as 80°C but leaves surrounding tissue undamaged and healthy. The heat destroys the diseased cells.

This treatment has been proven to completely eradicate prostate cancer in 93% of men treated. Where the cancer has not affected the prostate nerve, only 20% of those men treated experienced impotence following the treatment. Less than 10% suffered any other side effects such as urinary incontinence, and none of the men treated during a 5 year study at the University of Regensburg in Bavaria reported negative lifestyle changes.

As alternative prostate cancer treatments go, HIFU is one that offers you the best chance of a cure with few or no side effects.