BPH - are we sure there are no other options?

I'm really happy to have found this forum website. Until now, I was limited to reading material from medical providers plus good whitepapers from researchers, not from real people.

Are most of you in the UK?

I agree the views expressed on this forum are both helpful and interesting.To answer your final sentence : No. I am in the UK but many of the comments on here mention insurance or expressed in $ so I assume the writers are in the USA,

A point I have not seen expressed is why not pay yourself for the treatment if your insurance will not reimburse or if it is nor available in the UK under NHS? It is generally much cheaper than buying a car, or often less than a foreign holiday. What matters most to you??

Last year I went to Poland for my PAE. The treatment cost around £2500 and our travelling/other costs around £1000. I reckon that money was better spent than on other choices

The most common give away is saying " Doctors Office"

It's a split between the UK and the USA.

We don't hear much about artificial organs and whether they last long , but someone should be working on perfecting an artificial prostate system since none of the procedures are perfect.

In the UK the only ones I knew who used catheters did it as a short term measure while waiting for surgery. The American Forumites do it long term because they for various reasons want to keep their prostates.

I'm hoping to avoid self catheterization if possible. I remember when my urologist had me self-inject Testosterone a few years ago. The first time he had me do it in his office with a nurse, I almost fainted as the needle came close to my leg! After that, it became pretty easy but i still didn't like doing it.

See? Another therapy that I had never heard of! And, I asked my urologist why there was no "stent" type of solution for BPH that simply forced the urethra open. I wonder how the impact of ITind lasts for very long since it seems that the prostate would just return to normal (restricted) status after a period of time.

It is said to be long lasting- I will wait a few years and see what the data says.

They are doing it in the US on the east coast. I am going to ask my Uro about it when i go in for a visit in Feb.

Funny, I told my Uro that I have had good outcome with the PAE and he said yah but are you retaining - you must come in and we need to measure. haha he was not so worried about it before.

To All on Site!!!

I was trying to amend a typo on my earlier post and couldn’t find a button. Can anyone help?

Also Michael Finasteride is a 5ARI!!

This is a very good site for men experiencing BPH and it emphasizes all our frustrations. They don’t know why or the best way to manage it and no effort is being made to correct this. Once governments did or paid for a lot of research into medicine. Now they’ve left it all to the private sector. If there’s a way for pharmaceutical companies, insurers or surgeons to make or save money there’s data collection or research if not none.

My prostate size was listed on ultrasounds and this came out to be pretty right when they were able to just weigh it. This site has cases where DRE estimates turned out to be very wrong. 5ARIs are supposed to reduce prostate size by 20% by stopping the conversion of testosterone to its more powerful form that prevents the natural loss of cell process. As more cells are then formed in that natural process the gland just grows, supposedly. My BPH went from 1990, 5ARIs 2013/14, no size reduction and PCa 2015.

Cancer doubt over BPH drug treatments have supposedly been proven wrong but not convincingly enough for me. Just as prostate biopsies have been proven not to spread cancer by survival rates for pancreatic biopsies???

BPH and PCa are our greatest loss of life and quality of life but so little is being done by governments to promote any knowledge about it where so much doubt exists. Perusal of internet sources finds a magnitude of “we don’t knows” or we don’t fully understands” where some positivity is essential. We need to get them off their xxxxs in this.

BarrieH

Someone on the forum had the iTind with good results. His name might be BobbyT. I did it with one of the trials

How about a prostate transplant ??

What would a donor who is still alive replace it with?

When they harvest body parts after a death.

Would a prostate harvested from another old person be what you want?

Obviously not, sadly many young people die.

If you want my prostate you can have it as I'm leaving my body to medical research.

I have not heard of any prostate transplants. Has anyone?

Honestly, unless you are making babies it seems like the prostate is unnecessary so a transplant doesn't make sense for all men. Installing a tube/hose/pipe from the bladder to the urethra seems logical. The main issue in doing this from what I've heard is that removing the prostate somehow negatively impacts bladder control either via nerves or something else. Otherwise, if there were no issues, it seems like prostatectomy would be something we'd all have done!