What are the promising experimental treatments for prostate cancer?
The most widespread form of experimental treatment for prostate cancer in the US today is probably cryotherapy (also known as cryosurgery and cryoablation). Many physicians and patients consider this form of therapy to be a major advance in the management of prostate cancer that is definitely confined to the prostate, offering benefits superior to those of radical surgery or radiotherapy. Other physicians argue that there is no data yet available to demonstrate the benefits claimed by the proponents of this new technique. Basically, cryotherapy involves controlled freezing of the prostate gland with liquid nitrogen to temperatures so low that the tissue is actually killed. Thus it is proposed to have effects comparable to radiation therapy. Until the completion of at least one well constructed clinical trial that carefully compares the results of cryotherapy to other forms of therapy in a randomized, controlled manner, we will not know whether cryotherapy actually offers superior or in
