Ignoring the symptoms of prostate enlargement is a mistake that becomes increasingly more costly the longer the condition is allowed to continue untreated. The symptoms develop slowly and are often considered just the effects of getting older. The consequence of ignoring the symptoms and putting off proper and appropriate evaluation and treatment can become disastrous if the situation is allowed to progress for a prolonged period of time.
While everyone knows that urinating blood requires immediate urological attention, the gradual progression of such symptoms as slowing of the stream, increasing frequency, a sensation of urgency, getting up at night, pushing to urinate, a feeling of incomplete emptying, and a slow and interrupted stream often permit delaying diagnosis and treatment because there may be so many other matters that are accorded higher priorities.
Progressive damage to the bladder and kidneys slowly and insidiously takes its toll until the damage becomes irreversible. The bladder muscle at first grows stronger trying to force the urine out through an increasingly obstructive prostate until it develops such a high pressure that the kidneys gradually inflate from the backpressure until the function of the kidneys becomes so impaired that uremic blood poisoning ensues. Treatment of course arrests the progress but it may not be able to completely reverse the kidney damage that has already been done. Everything depends upon how long the symptoms were ignored.
How long the symptoms were ignored may also affect the type of treatment that will be effective. The longer the procrastination, the more likely it becomes that surgery will be required. The earlier the symptoms are addressed, the greater the chances for success of the non-surgical treatments such as medication or microwave thermotherapy.
For most patients, the initial treatment is a combination of two drugs; one to shrink the size of the prostate and the other to relax the intensity of the muscle contractions in the prostate. Both drugs work to reduce the severity of the prostate obstruction to the outflow of urine and thereby to protect the bladder and kidneys from further damage.
There are some patients, who are unable or unwilling to tolerate side effects of these medications such as impotency or drug interactions with other medications their condition require or simply the bother and expense involved in staying on medication for a lifetime. For these patients, the next logical step would be to use the one-time non-surgical in-office anesthesia-free microwave thermotherapy treatment. I have chosen the TherMatrx System because of its great safety record.
This FDA approved treatment has been used with great success worldwide for the past 14 years in many hundreds of thousands of cases and there has never been even one serious adverse effect reported to the FDA. So don’t ignore the symptoms until your only remaining options are surgery or kidney dialysis. The peril is real; don’t delay.
Questions? Call Dr. Okun at 718-241-6767
