Written by admin on 2009-03-30T07:55:46+0000">March 30, 2009 – 7:55 am
The findings in surgery determine the course of the operation—more or less tissue is removed, depending on what the surgeon sees when the body is opened up. If, for example, there is any hint that the cancer has escaped the prostate along the nerve bundles that lie on either side of it, these nerves should be “widely excised”—cut out, along with as much nearby tissue as possible. But if a man has received hormonal treatment, the surgeon may be reassured—falsely—about the extent of disease. A surgeon may think, “There’s no way the cancer could ever reach out this far, not after that hormone treatment I started. I’ll leave these nerve bundles in and give this guy a break—now he can keep his sexual potency.” As a result of such well-meaning thinking, the surgeon may leave malignant cells behind instead of doing what any good surgeon normally does in a cancer operation—cutting out as much tissue as possible in an aggressive, no-holds-barred attempt to cure the disease.
There’s another extremely important fact you should know about hormone therapy: It’s effective only while a patient is on it. The day you stop taking it is the day it stops working. Inevitably and almost immediately, the cancer cells begin growing again. If a surgeon has been timid or overconfident during surgery and not removed all the tissue that needed to be removed, the cancer is going to come back—hormones didn’t kill it.
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