aggressive treatments are merely designed to remove the cancer get it out of your body. if it’s aggressive and we pursue a conservative approach we may fail and the problem with this is there’s no second place in this race. you either survive or you don’t. so aggressive treatment is surgical removal. for many years it was a fairly horrendous big operation a lot of blood loss time in the intensive care and you were miserable for a long time weeks if not months. but with advances in surgical techniques new laparoscopic techniques the operation is a couple of hours you’re in and out some men are home the next day and feeling great they can’t believe they had anything done. in fact the biggest problem is that we want men to take it easy and they feel so good they want to resume normal strenuous activity. so aggressive surgical management removing the cancer is still the gold standard. it’s still the primary way to get the cancer out of your body so you can live a normal life. if you’re not a candidate for aggressive surgery or you don’t want aggressive surgery which is always your option then there are outstanding conservative approaches. in fact some of the new techniques in radiation have revolutionized so some people think it may actually be as good as surgery. that includes some of the new radiation techniques radioactive seed therapy hormone therapy are also becoming far more positive with some of the chemotherapy options and now with some of the new approaches with vaccine and gene therapy. so things are very exciting in a conservative way so that you can benefit from the treatment but not suffer from the side effects of the treatment.
what are treatment options for prostate cancer?