RE: Reprise: Things That Puzzle Me About PCa # 14 in an unlimited series

[Guest guest]

I’ll bet the people who took aspirin

were quite happy that their headaches were ‘cured’ even thought no

one knew how the drugs worked!!!

Many drugs that are FDA approved are used ‘off

list’ – in other words experimentally and successfully. One example

that comes to mind is thalidomide – no one ever ran studies or sought FDA

approval before using it experimentally in cases of prostate cancer, yet it

seems that there has been some limited success with the drug. The cure for stomach

ulcers was the most recent example of evidence that a theory worked following

an experiment. We can’t always know everything, but we can observe

outcomes.

There is an old joke about how we came to

enjoy roast pork (because the sty burned down with a pig inside which led to a

lot of sty fires) but the question is often asked about items like oysters and

snails – who on earth thought “That’s a tasty looking meal”?

Sometimes we just have to try things.

All the best

Prostate men need enlightening, not

frightening

Terry

Herbert - diagnosed in 1996 and

still going strong

Read A Strange Place for unbiased information at http://www.yananow.org/StrangePlace/index.html

From: ProstateCancerSupport [mailto:ProstateCancerSupport ] On Behalf Of Alan

Meyer

Sent: Tuesday, 13 September 2011

5:46 AM

To: ProstateCancerSupport

Subject: Re:

RE: [NewDx] Reprise: Things That Puzzle Me About PCa #

14 in an unlimited series

I've never seen a good explanation of how ADT actually

works. I

have read that most, but not all, tumor cells depend on receiving

androgens from outside the cell to signal them to replicate, but

I haven't seen an explanation of exactly what happens to cells

that don't receive the androgens. I presume they die. But how

many of them die, which ones die, why they die, and why some of

them don't die? I don't know. There seems to be a huge amount

of research in these areas but progress is slow. Our knowledge

is very incomplete.

As so often happens in medicine, we have empirical evidence that

a treatment works, but the explanation has to wait for much

further research. I believe, for example, that aspirin was

discovered a hundred years before anyone knew how it worked.

Without an explanation for how it works, and without an

explanation for why it would work for local disease but not

metastatic disease, and without a randomized clinical trial to

establish that it really does work, and without knowing how much

and how long ADT is required, and knowing that it does have

significant side effects, I'd be very hesitant to try or to

recommend ADT when surgery or radiation are available as curative

treatments.

There are people who doubt the efficacy of surgery and radiation

- claiming that they only cure people who would not die of the

disease anyway. However I think there really is good evidence

that they work for many patients.

Alan