6 Issues to Address With Your Prostate Specialist

When it comes to your prostate health, remember that you are the most important man in the room.

Illustration by The Epoch Times, Shutterstock

I once worked at a center where nearly every man was steered toward the same surgery, which sometimes left part of the tumor behind. That experience stayed with me. It reminded me that prostate cancer care should never feel like being on an assembly line.

If you have been diagnosed with prostate cancer, you may suddenly find yourself in a world of white coats, statistics, and overwhelming decisions. It is easy to feel like you are the least important person in the room. The truth is the opposite: You are the most important man in the room.

6 Issues to Clarify With Your Prostate Specialist

You deserve more than one-size-fits-all answers. You deserve clear explanations. You deserve real options. Above all, you deserve a voice in every decision that affects your health, your longevity, and your quality of life.

1. Understand Your Risk Group

Upon diagnosis, one of the first things you will hear is that your cancer falls into a “risk category.” Doctors assign this based on three things:

• Prostate-Specific Antigen (PSA) Test: Determined by a blood test, levels are used to investigate prostate cancer
• Biopsy Results: Show how many “cores” or tiny tissue samples exhibit cancer and how aggressive it is
• Tumor Stage: Tumor, node, and metastatis staging, or TNM staging, is a system that describes whether the cancer is confined to the prostate, has spread to nearby tissue, or has spread beyond

The labels sound simple—low risk, intermediate risk, high risk—but they only tell part of the story. They are like broad buckets based on averages across thousands of men.