What You Should Know About Prostate Cancer. Daniel C. Merrill
What You Should Know About Prostate Cancer
by
Daniel C. Merrill MD
Copyright 2011 Daniel C. Merrill MD,
All rights reserved.
Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com
ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-0157-7
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Disclaimers and/or Legal Notices
The information presented herein represents the view of the author at the date of publication. While every attempt has been made to verify the information in this report to make sure it is accurate, neither the author nor any of his affiliates/partners assume any responsibility for errors, inaccuracies or omissions of any kind. This book is for informational purposes only.
Author: Daniel C. Merrill MD
About the author
The Merrill brothers, Dr Merrill’s father and uncle, were pioneers of the Seventh Day Adventist Colony in Eel Rock, California in 1933. Eel Rock is located on the banks of the wild and scenic North Fork of the Eel River, about 20 miles upriver from its’ junction with the South Fork at Dyersville.
Because of the educational limitations of this sparsely populated rural area, the Merrill’s ultimately moved to Myers Flat on the more populous South Fork of the Eel River in 1948. Dr Merrill graduated from South Fork High school in Miranda in 1955. He subsequently graduated from the University of California at Berkeley with honor and a degree in Physiology four years later; when Dr Merrill graduated from the University of Southern California Medical School; he became the first student from South Fork High School to become a MD.
After completed his internship and a year of surgical residency in California, Dr Merrill moved to Minnesota where he performed his Urology Residency under the late Donald Creevy at the University Of Minnesota Health Sciences Center in Minneapolis. After completing his residency, Dr Merrill performed a NIH special fellowship in Urology at the University of Minnesota and subsequently joined the staff of the Urology department at that institution.
In 1973 Dr Merrill was recruited by the University of California Davis to administer their Urology training program at the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Martinez California. Dr Merrill served as Chief of Urology in that institution until its closure for seismic considerations in 1991.
During his career at the VA Dr Merrill was responsible for the care of thousands of men with prostate cancer and has performed hundreds of radical retropubic prostatectomies. He has also taught 42 residents how to perform the procedure. Dr Merrill also has worked extensively in the field of impotence and was the pioneer surgeon for the Mentor inflatable penile prosthesis as well as several other implantable medical devices.
In this eBook Dr. Merrill shares the knowledge gained from his 35 plus years treating males with prostate cancer with the reader. It is Dr Merrill’s firm belief that no one should die of prostate cancer in the 21st century. Dr Merrill also believes that the key to beating this potentially lethal cancer is early diagnosis and aggressive surgical removal of the cancer before it has spread outside the confines of the prostate gland. Younger cancer free males should use the information in this book to be sure that they are being properly screened for prostate cancer at appropriate intervals.
Men who have developed prostate cancer should use the information in this book to familiarize themselves with the various options for treatment as well as the pros and cons of the most common choices for treating prostate cancer. It is essential that the male with prostate cancer have this information at his finger tips when he discusses his treatment options with his urologist or radiotherapist.
Additional eBooks by Dr Merrill
Dr Merrill has published three eBooks. The Northern California Camper provides a comprehensive review of the beautiful campgrounds in the Northwestern part of our magnificent state. This 143 page, 29,286 word book contains 98 colored photographs which reveal the beauty of our state and county campgrounds and the area surrounding them.
His second book, Growing Earthworms for Fun and Profit, was written to encourage the composting of household waste and newspaper with earthworms. Dr Merrill tells the reader how to convert their garbage into valuable forms of organic fertilizer and by so doing reduce their garbage bills and the amount of waste that is presently being deposited in our increasingly scarce landfills. To date, this is Dr Merrill’s best seller, possibly because it deals with such a pressing environmental problem.
Dr Merrill’s third eBook, So, You want to go to Medical School?, should serve as a wake-up call for high school and college students who are considering medicine as a career. In this book, Dr Merrill reviews some of the objectionable changes that have occurred in the medical profession over the past 50 years and points out the economic disadvantages of a medical education in today’s anti-capitalistic socialist driven society. This may be the most important book a prospective medical student and/or his parents will ever read.
1. What is the prostate?
The prostate is a nonessential organ that surrounds the male urethra at the bladder neck. The gland can vary greatly is size between individuals. The largest prostate I ever removed was the size of a grapefruit and I have encountered many that were as large as a medium sized orange; however, most prostate glands, especially in young men, are the size of a small to medium sized walnut.
Two things happen to the prostate that can impair a male’s health as he grows older. First, and most commonly, the prostate tends to increase in size and by so doing obstructs the flow of urine. This is a benign condition commonly referred to as BPH (benign prostatic hypertrophy). There are drugs, such as Proscar, that are somewhat successful in treating this condition by shrinking the prostate and a variety of surgical procedures that are designed to relieve urethral obstruction by removing the interior of the prostate gland.
The second, and potentially vastly more dangerous, change that may develop in the males prostate as they age is the malignancy commonly referred to as prostate cancer. That, of course, is the primary subject of this eBook.
2. What are some of the important characteristics of prostate cancer?
Prostate cancer is the most common non-skin cancer in males and is the second most common cancer cause of death in males, right after lung cancer. The bad news is that 1 in 6 males will develop prostate cancer in his lifetime; the good news is that the malignancy is entirely curable if diagnosed when it is still within the confines of the prostatic capsule.
Prostate cancer tends to be a more benign disease in older males as shown by the fact that around 80% of elderly males who die from unrelated conditions have prostate cancer that had not been diagnosed prior to death. Nonetheless, prostate cancer is an extremely serious disease as shown by the fact that over 217,000 males were diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2010 and over 32,000 died from the malignancy.
My experience in treating prostate cancer at the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Martinez California, suggested that prostate cancer was a must more aggressive tumor in black men than it was in Caucasian males. This observation has been confirmed by numerous workers in the field. The fact is that black males are 1.5 times more likely to develop prostate cancer than are their Caucasian counterparts and are 2 to 3 times more likely to die from the disease. I believe that this is due to the fact that the Gleason scores (the histological grade of the cancer) are, on average, much higher in newly diagnosed black men with prostate cancer than they are in white males of the same age when they are first found to have the disease.
The second important exception to the general rule that prostate cancer tends to be a relatively benign