Why Can’t Prostate Cancer Always Be Cured?
All too often, we don’t have answers to any of the following: • Why a particular person got prostate cancer • When they first got prostate cancer • Whether their prostate cancer is actually confined to the prostate or not • Whether it is a good idea to actually treat their cancer at all • Whether the most appropriate treatment will in fact work, or • Even if it does work, how long it will work for! Given all those things we don’t know about a particular patient, perhaps it is amazing that we actually seem to be able to cure as many cases of prostate cancer as we do! There are two critical problems when it comes to treating prostate cancer: • In the first place, in the majority of men, prostate cancer is a very slowly growing form of cancer. By the time it is detected and diagnosed, it may have been developing for years. This means that there has been a lot of time for very small groups of prostate cancer cells to spread inside and outside the prostate. Small groups of prostate cancer c
