Newsletter for January - February, 2008 pg 4

Have you noticed that every time a politician begins to go up in the polls, attacks starts coming their way? Evidently, the same thing happens in the medical field.

Early in December of 2007, I received an unsolicited glossy booklet from the Florida Center for Prostate Care. The title, “Prostate Cancer Questions?” got my attention since I am currently going through treatments for the disease, and continue to research the subject. There is some very good general information in most of this ten-page booklet. The Center also makes a good case for their expertise: Prostate Seed Implants (Brachytherapy) plus their use of Intensity Modulated Radiation Therapy (IMRT) and Image Guided Radiation Therapy (IGRT) for moderate to high-risk patients. However, rather than just market their own expertise, they go out of their way to single out and attack Proton Therapy (my choice). It would appear based on other seniors I have talked to; this booklet was widely distributed to our age group. Since I feel very strongly that it is important for those considering prostrate cancer treatments to make informed choices, I would like to respond to their conclusions concerning Proton Therapy.

In the Introduction to the booklet, Doctor Terk indicates they will present straightforward information about prostate cancer, and includes as a bullet: Why prostate seed implants offer results far better than most other treatments, including proton beam therapy. This rather definitive conclusion didn’t upset me as much as what followed on page two.
After acknowledging that 1,453 research studies concluded that prostate seed implants, radical surgery, and external radiation treatment are all similarly effective options, the next paragraph lets out the attack dogs. It reads, (with bold print as appears in the booklet), “In contrast, studies have shown that results with proton beam radiation are inferior to newer more successful treatments such as seed implants”. When I was Chairman of a University Graduate Program, and a member of our Thesis Committee, had any student written such a bold statement without listing the studies that led to his or her conclusion, their findings would not have been accepted? But wait, next we get some innuendoes, which are also professionally unacceptable. In the next paragraph, proton therapy is correctly identified as more costly and time consuming than seed implants. Then in the next sentence several other treatments are identified as still considered experimental “by most.” One might incorrectly assume that proton therapy also falls into this category, since it is in the same two-sentence paragraph.