On Men

After writing an article last September about prostate cancer treatment options, I received a flood of mail chastising me for not mentioning proton beam therapy. I noted in a subsequent blog entry that, as a result of that feedback from readers, I decided to take a second look at proton beam therapy. The resulting magazine piece was published Wednesday on the U.S. News website and will appear in print on Monday. Let me know what you think of it.

For that article, I expanded my scope beyond prostate cancer to other cancers and also looked at the expansion of proton centers. It's a fascinating and complex topic, and one that I expect we'll be hearing a lot more about in the future. In the meantime, I've excerpted and responded to six of the comments I got on my earlier blog post. Here they are, in no particular order:

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Part 3 of six posts today about proton beam therapy. To start from the top, click here.

Rick Plummer of Florida on the "stonewalling effect" from urologists

...I was not informed about proton therapy by my urologist, like many of these men, and found it on my own through diligent research on the internet. When I asked him about the option I was told "Oh no! Don't go there. They will burn you up!" There was a unifying theme to the stories I was told by men in treatment at [University of Florida]. Almost all of us had to overcome this "stonewalling effect" or discouragement by the doctors and were left to our own devices to come to a decision about which treatment option to take. We were universally happy with our treatment at the Proton Institute and felt bonded as if we were soldiers in a battle unit. Often that meant we had gone up against a common enemy and prevailed. Not Cancer, but our Urologist!

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Part 5 of six posts today about proton beam therapy. To start from the top, click here.

John Falvey on the cost of proton beam therapy

...I note with interest your remark about the added cost of this type of treatment. As a retired business school prof I would be interested in seeing a comparative analysis of costs of various types of treatment that respond to this disease. You may be interested in knowing that apart from out-of-pocket travel and local living arrangements, all of the medical costs associated with two months of treatment at Loma Linda were entirely covered by Medicare and AARP.

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Real men should eat liver (or carrot juice, or sweet potatoes), not vitamin supplements. That's because yet another study has come out questioning the value of megadoses of vitamins. The BBC, ABC, and Science Daily have versions of the story. The advice, as I suggested in an earlier post on this topic, is to get your vitamins and antioxidants from real food instead of pills when possible. Forgotten where vitamins naturally come from? Here's a quick refresher (foods are listed in order of decreasing vitamin richness):

Vitamin A
Organ meat (liver, giblets), carrot juice, sweet potato (with peel), pumpkins, carrots, spinach, collards, kale

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