Thank you for being with us today Dr. Scholz.
Good to be here.
So, as usual, we're going to be asking common questions that we see come up either on Google
searches or that we have asked by our patient audience, and one of the big questions that
I see Googled quite often is actually quite a scary question, but I feel like there is
a soothing answer to a lot of prostate cancer patients out there, and that is, "Is prostate
cancer fatal?"
That's a good question because people are always confused by the fact that some people
definitely die of prostate cancer, but are also told that it's a harmless condition,
so what's going on with that? I think the confusing thing is that there are different
types of prostate cancer. In the skin cancer world, we use different names for the bad
ones. We call them melanomas and the less malignant ones, we call them squamous cells
or basal cells, and if someone tells you they have skin cancer, you generally assume it's
one of the low-malignant types and no one makes a big deal out of it. They assume you'll
just have it frozen or it's not going to hurt you. And there are types of prostate cancer
like that, that don't hurt you, and we can identify them—particularly the grade Gleason
6 or the Epstein grade 1 cancers. I have been shown that they don't spread, and if cancer
doesn't spread it definitely doesn't lead to any fatal problems. But there are other
types of cancer and I think another confusing thing is that even though prostate cancer
in the higher grades can spread and certainly can kill people, the process of the disease
unfolds over 10-20 years where with many other serious cancers (like pancreas cancer or lung
cancer) we're looking at a 3 to 6 to 9 month time period for someone to die and so people
get confused by that as well even though the higher grade prostate are potentially fatal
in a minority of cases, most these days are cured and if they aren't cured, most are controlled.
But there are a few people who are still dying of prostate cancer, but it's oftentimes 10,
15, 20 years later, from the time they were diagnosed. So, all those things, as you point
out, I think are generally good news for people with prostate cancer. There's still a subgroup
of people that are getting into trouble and have life-threatening disease.
Yeah, I find the word cancer itself is often that trigger point that brings immense fear
and a lot of issues, but I don't think that people realize that there's so many different
types, especially in prostate cancer, and it does need to be treated as an individual
type.
There are other relatively less dangerous cancers. One we called chronic lymphocytic
leukemia. Leukemia sounds horrific and there are some very deadly variants of leukemia,
but as people get older a lot of people develop a rising white count, and they call it chronic
lymphocytic leukemia, and it can be dangerous after many years in some people, but the word
cancer is a dreadful word and for most people, it means imminent death, and for the prostate
cancer that often is not a very accurate representation of what's going on.
My old partner, Ralph Blum, thought after living with this for many years—my co-author
in the book "Invasion of the Prostate Snatchers—he said that he thought of it more like a chronic
condition than as a cancer.
Yeah, I find patients who know their Gleason score and their type of prostate cancer and
have researched their treatments and talked to their doctor—after they've gotten over
that initial fear and they know the situation, they too look at it very often like a chronic
situation.
If you would like to know what type of prostate cancer you have, we do have some great resources
on our website. You can answer a six-question quiz, and that will lead you to a staging
guide for your particular type of prostate cancer based off of your medical records.
You can go to PCRI.ORG and our website will direct you to it right away.
Thank you for watching! If you enjoyed this video, go ahead and give us a thumbs-up, and
if you have further questions go ahead and leave them in the comment section below, and
for more information visit our website PCRI.ORG