Can exercise cure Prostate Cancer!

I think the issue is not whether research is useful or not, it is the manner in which it is conducted that is the problem. The trial is a pre-evaluation of whether exercise can help to reduce the rate of development of prostate cancer and is another example of a "scatter gun" approach to finding factors that may be of help. I read the description of the trial on the Cancer Research website, and was a bit worried. 50 men will be recruited, of whom 25 will be put on a supervised exercise programme, and 25 on a specified, but not supervised programme. Men aged between 50 and (I think) 70 will be included. That in itself is a pretty small sample size, and does not mention consistency in other factors that could influence prostate cancer growth - how aggressive the cancer is, genetic background, ethnicity, height, weight, starting level of fitness, diet (and the recently reported factor of the regularity of ejaculation) etc etc. And on top of this, there is no mention of a control group who just get on with life.

Personally, I have had experience of the effects of two of these "scatter gun" approaches. One is the well-known pelvic floor exercise to reduce incontinence mantra. If men do pelvic floor exercises and their incontinence after prostate removal is reduced or goes away, then the PFEs are cited as the reason, but would they have improved without them? Who can possibly know? For me, PFEs did not work, or have any noticeable effect at all, therefore, using the same logic, they are at best an irrelevance.

The second experience concerned testosterone replacement therapy. In 2014, I had a truly miserable time with almost continuous colds, coughs and chest infections, and eventually was diagnosed as having testosterone levels very close to zero. (and no, I have never been on hormone therapy). Despite having five years of unmeasurable PSA, I had to have a massive argument with the endocrinology specialists before being allowed to have TRT. Their assertion that TRT could bump up PSA and possibly restart prostate cancer elsewhere in my body was based on research that was about 60 years out of date, with a minimal sample size, and they took no notice of 15 years worth of subsequent published research debunking the relationship between testosterone and the resurgence of prostate cancer after prostate removal.

Concentration of attention on researching the fundamental clinical causes of prostate, and other cancers will, eventually, yield firm results, and from these results, other factors, even such as exercise regimes, may be identified as contributing factors. My problem is with research done the other way round and being treated as definitive.

Hi Guys,

A few random thoughts that occur to me are as follows:

We often talk of PCa as a 'disease', perhaps implying that it is something alien to our bodies which we catch or develop?

However the NHS statistics, from autopsies, reveal that as we get older we pretty much all get cancer, 60% of men in their 60's have some detectable prostate cancer, and the older we get the more likely that is.

So should we perhaps consider cancer as a purely natural side effect of aging?

This of course causes us pschological problems, because we are not really at ease with the concept that we are all going to get old and die, but before we do various bits of our bodies are going to deteriorate.  So we try and rationalise this, believing if we don't let bits of us deteriorate we won't die?

On the subject of research, is all medical research conducted with equal vigour, and is some of it flawed?

Take for example my mother, she died last year aged 88 after a pretty good life.  Her final years were a slow spiral of decline, an irregular heart beat caused her to slowly become senile, atrial fibrilation causing vascular dementia, 2 years before she died she sufferred a minor stroke, a lacunar infarct, it put her briefly in hospital but wasn't a major issue, 12 months later she sufferred a big profound stroke, the sort that literally knocked her off her feet, she never walked again, it destroyed her memory and put her in a nursing home for the rest of her life.

When she died, a doctor who didn't know her, thumbed through her notes and recorded on her death certificate the lacunar infarct as a contributory factor to her death, there was no mention of the major stroke!

I don't blame that doctor, in a busy day with lots of living patients to care for, there is not time to read copious medical notes before signing off a death certificate.

However that raises the question of how valid is any medical research which takes any notice of what is recorded as cause of death?   

So to return to the main point, who knows what causes cancer, and on what research is that knowledge based?

:)

Dave

Edited by member 06 Jan 2016 at 21:36  | Reason: Not specified