What prostate cancer treatment options did you choose and why?

Making treatment decisions can feel overwhelming, especially when there are several good options to consider. This community is a wonderful place to learn from others who have walked this path before you. Each person's journey is unique based on their specific situation, and hearing different perspectives on active surveillance versus immediate treatment approaches can provide valuable insights as you work with your healthcare team to find the right path forward.

Dear Keith L — Unless there’s something about your case that’s very serious or very complex, I suggest you go with monitoring. I am three years into a nightmare originating with Stage 1, PSA 6.7, Gleason 4+4, single-core, 0.83 mm—leading to what now seems certainly to have been over diagnosis and overtreatment, from which I’m unlikely to ever recover a decent quality of life. And I hasten to add that the CANCER has never caused me so much as an itch. ALL of my debilitations and disabilities result from cancer TREATMENT. I had 42x EBRT and 4 months ADT from Jan. 31, 2024 to June 13, 2024, and the negative impacts and effects have been mounting ever since. Always bear in mind: Your “Care Team” has reason to treat in as many ways as possible and no reason to simply monitor. I wish I’d recognized these facts from the outset. YOU must be the advocate for you, and you’re up against an entire medical-industrial complex. If your docs advocate for any treatment other than monitoring, tell them to show you that the “cure” is unlikely to be worse than the disease. It’s unlikely they can do that, because in all but the most serious and advanced cancers, the debilitating side effects are likely to be numerous and permanent. I apologize for being so negative, but I had trusted my docs to tell me the minuses of treatment as well as the plusses—and they didn’t. And don’t believe patient information literature, either, it sugar-coats everything. Instead, read articles in the professional peer-reviewed medical journals—where doctors tell other doctors the whole truth about the treatments they recommend to patients. Also read the professional oncological and urological press, which usually reports the downsides with the upsides of various treatment modalities. Most of all, keep reading Outcomes4Me—to get the real facts from other patients and feel the support of those in the same situation as you.