trifecta in prostate cancer: robotic vs. open prostatectomy… Mr.proton beam you’re next!

Podbean Podcast on the Trifecta and Open vs. Robotic

Patients often times choose a procedure for the wrong reasons. Patients often glamorize newer treatments. Patients often have a treatment, become an advocate of that treatment and somewhat defensive of that treatment and actively recommend it to other’s as the “only way to go.” Sometimes they are right…sometimes they are way wrong. Sometimes they are helpful to the newly diagnosed patients, sometimes I think they are harmful.

It reminds of an intellent CEO patient in whom I recommended a prostate biopsy. “You can do it if you want but I’ll tell you this. I was the first person in the southeast to have a heart valve done by the robot. If this biopsy shows prostate cancer and I need surgery, I am having a robot do it!”

You patients who elect to have the robotic prostatectomy and think you won’t “potentially” have the complications inherent in seperating and removing the prostate from your body and it’s junction with the bladder superiorly and the urethra inferiorly, and then having it hooked back up, still exist and “a decision made without this consideration is a decision made in error . This is true if knives, lasers, or even a Swiss Army knife is used. (I am referring to the physical nature of removing something and then having to hook it back up.)

Proton…I am gonna take a look at you next, share a patient’s story who flew to have Proton done.  Having your cake and eating it too, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, just cause it’s new don’t mean it’s better, learning an isolated fact about a disease then applying it in broad strokes to make a decision a flawed and inadequate primise.    Wow…did I come up with that. That was good!

Now don’t get defensive…I just want you to think and make an informed incision…I mean decision. (A urologic Freudian slip…noooo)

I don’t want you to do what I did…I want you to make your decision the “way” I did.