Jul
9
YOUR PROSTATE
PLAN IT OUT AHEAD
There are other ways to live more comfortably with your BPH.
• A long car trip. Plan where you’re going to stop. Most car rides tend to stimulate the urinary tract. This may be partly due to nervous tension if you’re the driver. Figure out where you can stop at least every two hours.
This will allow you to gas up, have a snack and use the bathroom. Some patients with BPH say sometimes on car trips they have been stuck in big cities where there were no filling stations, and by the time they found one they nearly tore the door off the men’s room to get inside.
• Going to a scary or suspenseful movie? Again nervous tension can increase the need to urinate. Performers get this problem before they go on. A really wild movie can do the same thing to most men. Try to use the bathroom before the movie starts. As a precaution, don’t buy a large cola drink to go along with your popcorn.
Remember “a pint in, a pint out,” and often the “pint out” part won’t wait until the movie is over.
• Let’s say you waited too long, your whole crotch is burning and throbbing and you have to urinate so bad you’re almost upset to your stomach. When you at last get to a bathroom, try for the toilet stall. Simply close the door, drop your pants and sit down.
No one seems to know why, but sitting down to urinate relaxes some muscles or the sphincter muscle, or something, and it makes urination at these difficult times much easier. At stress times like this, many BPH patients say it’s taken them five minutes of standing at a urinal or at the bathroom at home before they can get even a drop of urine out.
Spasming of muscles seems to be relaxed, and the whole system simply works easier and much faster in these stress situations, if you can sit down and bend forward toward your knees.
At this point who cares why it works, it does and will work any time you have trouble getting a urine flow started as well. Don’t fight it, just try it!
COPING WITH YOUR BPH
You’ve known that you’ve been living with your BPH for what - a year, three years? You’re a short timer. Most urologists have had literally thousands of years of experience with BPH through their patients. Your doctor may have a dozen little hints and helps like those above that have worked for hundreds of his BPH patients. No, these are not big dramatic findings that can be reported in the New England Journal of Medicine or the Journal of the American Medical Association.
However, your own doctor or urologist may have a small gold mine of tips and hints that he’s picked up over the years to make a big difference in how you can live easier and more comfortably with early and more advanced stages of BPH.
The next time you’re in his office, ask him if he has any of these little gems of BPH trivia advice that might just fit some problem that you’ve been having. The best advice is: Always go to the expert: talk to your urologist.
Jul
7
PROSTATE PROBLEMS AND ALCOHOL, BEER AND COFFEINE.
July 7, 2009 | Leave a Comment
ALCOHOL AND BEER
You knew this was coming. Alcohol is not good for the human body. Alcohol is especially not good for men with BPH.
“Hell, give up beer and a few shots of bourbon and maybe a highball or two? Damn, I’d rather die!” Such typical comments by moderate and heavy drinkers is often answered with the assurance of: “You will die and probably sooner than you expected to.”
For years some urologists have said that alcohol irritates the prostate. It also can cause serious problems with the liver. Some of the flavorings in alcohol can affect the prostate to such a degree that it can cause a kind of chronic prostatitis
For a man with even early BPH, the sudden or overuse of alcohol can bring on a surprise attack of acute retention of urine. This condition results in a desperate need to urinate but it is impossible. A quick trip to a doctor’s office or the emergency room of a hospital for catheterization and draining the bladder follows.
Good old common sense dictates that a man with even early BPH should seriously consider his consumption of alcohol and its relation to his prostatic condition. At this point many men simply don’t want to take the risk or stand the pain and problems associated with alcohol and BPH and stop drinking.
Beer drinkers will be furious, but the pint-in, pint-out and the much used bathrooms at bars and taverns, indicate that it is well known that beer drinking is immediately followed by voluminous urination.
Here common sense leaps up again. Beer drinking in the afternoon may be easily tolerated by some men, but not by others. Late night beer drinking will almost surely trigger two or three additional night time trips to the bathroom that otherwise could have been avoided.
If you insist on drinking beer, use a little common sense so it doesn’t trigger more unpleasant BPH reactions.
COFFEE, COLAS AND CAFFEINE
Yes, caffeine is the big tiger on your back here. Caffeine is a stimulant to the urinary tract: it makes you urinate more and more frequently. For most well people this is no problem, not even a minor inconvenience. Over the years your body will adapt to the added caffeine.
But when you have BPH, it’s different. You don’t need any more stimulation in your urinary tract. Neither do you need any more volume.
The BPH coffee drinker who normally goes through twelve, eight ounce cups of coffee a day is going to have a much harder time living with his urinary tract, than the non-coffee drinker, or even the man who drinks twelve, eight ounces of non-caffeine fluids a day.
Ounce for ounce, coffee and tea contain twice the amount of caffeine that regular cola drinks do. Of course now most of the colas come in caffeine free types as well. This is one place where you can have your cola and not your caffeine.
In the same manner, there are many caffeine free coffee brands now on the market.
If you want to manage your body with a little more “smarts” give the caffeine free drinks a test in your own bathroom. You’ll probably be pleasantly surprised when you make the test.
Oh, the “Principle of the single differential”. When you make any of these intake tests, try to do everything else the same, except for the item you’re testing. If you have two differentials (variables) in your life style, you won’t be able to tell which one made the difference, if there is a difference. It’s an old principle from the physical sciences but it works.
If you drink caffeine fluids, take the test. Try the caffeine free types for a week, doing nothing else different. One BPH patient said it cut his nocturia risings down from two a night to one. After a few weeks you’ll even forget what the caffeine laced drink tasted like.
Don’t forget that many of the current pain pills for headaches, colds and hay fever also contain caffeine. While these aren’t taken often, you might look for some that don’t have caffeine in them, such as the ibuprofen medications.
Jul
7
ACUTE URINE RETENTION. BHP.
July 7, 2009 | Leave a Comment
ACUTE URINE RETENTION
In this busy, busy world of ours, many men are working so hard and going so fast that they don’t take time for regular physical checkups. Some never think about prostate problems until it’s almost too late.
Again the symptoms of BPH can slip up on a busy man. He simply figures that by sixty-three he should be urinating more often and he’s heard other men talk about needing to get up at night once or twice. He thinks nothing of it.
Then one day he needs to urinate but can’t. He stands there waiting and then straining but he can’t pass even a few drops and he’s hurting like crazy. Soon the pain is so agonizing that he calls his doctor or rushes down to a hospital emergency room to find out what’s the matter.
A catheter drains the urine from the distended bladder and relieves the problem. Some patients with acute urine retention might be holding as much as a quart of urine. Most patients will look much better within minutes and feel fine in an hour or so.
A sudden attack of acute urine retention can happen to almost any man who has some obstruction already in his urethra. There are also conditions that can bring on such attacks.
Prolonged exposure to the cold, especially if you are not used to it can sometimes bring on such an attack. Drinking alcohol by someone not used to it. The sudden use of antihistamines is also a culprit in this case.
Such an attack is usually enough for the patient to have his prostate checked critically by an urologist who will advise him if any treatment or surgery is needed — as well as suggestions about how to prevent such an attack in the future.
So, there is your primer on BPH, its symptoms and some details about the problems it brings up. Now, is there a way to live with these problems during that time when the doctor recommends no major treatment is needed. We’ll look at that in the next chapter.
Jul
7
LIES, MYTHS AND OLD WIVES TALES ABOUT PROSTATITIS
This is a good time to start debunking some of the wild stories and myths and gossip that usually makes the rounds about the lowly prostate. Here are a list of the top ten. You may have heard of some more:
1. Prostate surgery always causes a man to become impotent.
This is simply not true. In the past it was more true than it is today, but now there are newer techniques used in surgery that do not disturb the nerve bundles that run on either side of the prostate. These nerves control a man’s ability to have an erection and intercourse. In cancer surgery, doctors have learned to remove the prostate usually without damaging these nerve bundles. However, some patients still suffer impotency. In the BPH surgery, only five percent of patients suffer any impotency.
2. An enlarged prostate, BPH, is a leading cause of prostate cancer.
Absolutely not. The enlargement of the prostate is in no way connected to the development of prostatic cancer. The cause of the enlargement is not known, but the cause of cancer is and the two are not linked. This myth may have come about because during some surgeries for the relief of BPH, the prostate is found to be cancerous when it had not been so diagnosed before. This actually can be one of the hidden benefits of such surgery.
3. Prostate surgery automatically sterilizes you.
In one half to two-thirds of the patients who have prostatic surgery where some or all of the prostate is removed, the normal course of the semen and other fluids usually ejaculated is disrupted. The fluid takes the course of least resistance and flows upward into the bladder instead of down the urethra and out the penis. To a man 60 or 65 this is usually not so important. However if children are wanted, the semen can be captured from urination soon after the orgasm and used for artificial insemination.
4. Prostate problems turn a man into a wimp.
If this happens it isn’t the result of the prostate problems. There is no loss of manhood, physical or psychological from any of the prostatic problems. There may be psychological side effects by various individuals, but these are mental in nature and could be casued by any number of reasons.
5. Prostate disorders are embarrassing to talk about because they mean a man is oversexed and having sex far too often.
A pure fantasy. Prostate problems and their treatments should not be embarrasing to talk about. Indeed a woman should realize an intelligent and understanding attitude toward prostate testing and evaluation, could save her husband’s life.
6. Orgasm for the man after prostate surgery isn’t the same, isn’t satisfying.
Simply not true. In case after case, the men report that the feeling at the time of orgasm and ejaculation is unchanged from what it was before surgery. Whether the ejaculation fluids go back into the bladder or out the penis, the feeling is exactly the same for the man. If there is a change, it is psychological and unfounded.
7. “Damn, man. Your sex life is over after BPH surgery.
Again, not factual. Any man’s sex life changes as he gets older. In his sixties and seventies a man has sex less frequently than when he was twenty. For at least ninety-five percent, a man’s sex life will be the same after BPH surgery as it was before. For the other five percent, there will be some problems with impotency—but that can be dealt with.
8. Incontinence is an automatic result of BPH surgery.
Researchers show us that only four percent of all BPH surgeries will result in the patients having trouble retaining their urine. That’s twenty-five to one odds, not bad.
9. There are lots of over the counter remedies that will cure my prostate without surgery.
By the end of 1990, the FDA took all such advertised remedies off the market. Previously the Postal Inspectors had closed down dozens of mail order houses who sold them. We will talk about the compounds in these products. Many people believe they are effective in reducing symptoms of BPH. Most do not say they can cure prostatic problems.
10. Prostate is a dirty word and a gentleman never mentions it in mixed company.
Ridiculous. In this more enlightened age, when women are encourged to examine their breasts for lumps, men must be encouraged and badgered into having at least yearly prostate examinations. The best way to do this is through education, and talking about the problem. Talking to the wives of the target men is often the most effective method.
Now, let’s move on to an in depth look at the ailment that affects nearly all older men, BPH.