Invasion of the Prostate Snatchers: An Essential Guide to Managing Prostate Cancer for Patients and their Families - Softcover

Blum, Ralph; Scholz, Mark M.D.

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9781590515150: Invasion of the Prostate Snatchers: An Essential Guide to Managing Prostate Cancer for Patients and their Families

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1590515153 ISBN 13: 9781590515150

Publisher: Other Press, 2011

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Radical prostatectomy is still the most widely recommended treatment for prostate cancer. Yet, according to a recent study, only one out of every forty-eight men who undergo this debilitating procedure survives longer than those who forgo surgery. Invasion of the Prostate Snatchers reports the latest thinking on prostate cancer management in clear, easy-to-understand prose. In a unique collaboration, a patient and his doctor provide a new perspective on living with this disease. Ralph Blum’s surprisingly entertaining twenty-year journey and eventual decision to treat his cancer as a “chronic condition,” together with Dr. Mark Scholz’s presentation of the newest scientific evidence, will liberate thousands of newly diagnosed men to pursue a noninvasive approach and thereby preserve normal sexual and urinary function.

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About the Author:

Ralph Blum, a cultural anthropologist and author, has written for various magazines including The New Yorker, Reader’s Digest, Cosmopolitan, and Vogue. Blum has published three novels and five nonfiction books on the oracular tradition, beginning with The Book of Runes. He has been living with prostate cancer, without radical intervention, for more than twenty years.

Mark Scholz, MD, has been treating men with prostate cancer exclusively since 1995. He is board certified in medical oncology and internal medicine and is the medical director of Prostate Oncology Specialists, Inc. He is also the executive director of the Prostate Cancer Research Institute

Assume you just learned that you have prostate cancer. As an uninformed layperson you reckon your demise is imminent. All of a sudden you are on death row. Your spouse and family feel this too. Your wife and children wonder about losing their provider. Your friends will look at you differently. So will your insurance company. Now factor in your own shock and horror, the unbalancing and disorienting realization that you have cancer. You have just received the worst news of your life; only moments before you were a normal healthy person. Now you’re wondering about splurging on a last set of golf clubs or planning a final get-together for the family in the Bahamas. Feelings of profound grief
and terror flood in. Rational thought is gone, emotion takes over.

Under these pressured circumstances the urologist smoothly assumes leadership. He seizes the wheel and you become the passenger. Disoriented, you have no idea, no idea at all, of what you have just done. You have become one more dutiful lamb being herded into the pen. You’ve already had one intimate experience with this stranger. You have already trusted him by allowing him to poke needles into what one woman called “the true heart of the male.” What is there to deter you now from trusting him to recommend treatment based on his findings? Why wouldn’t you trust him now to prescribe his treatment of choice? It simply doesn’t occur to you to think otherwise. The hook has been set. What usually happens is that you uncritically proceed to make an appointment for surgery.

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