Armor Men’s Health is brought to you by NAU Urology Specialists.
The Armor Men’s Health Hour is a show dedicated to providing information on a variety of medical topics, some of which may include sensitive subject material about penises. All cases discussed have been done with the permission of the people involved—and their penises.
Welcome to the Armor Men’s Health Hour with Dr. Mistry and Donna Lee. We have been so lucky to be able to give you a year’s worth of shows now. The radio show is a wonderful way to connect the community with what we do.
The HIFU Treatment
This has been a big week for us. A big part of what we do in our urology practice is the treatment for prostate cancer. If you’ve been a listener of the show, you may be aware that we do a special kind of treatment. It’s not widely available. It’s called high intensity focused ultrasound or HIFU treatment for prostate cancer.
It’s almost too good to be true. We have patients, I would say about 70 to 80% of our patients that get this treatment for prostate cancer come from outside of Austin. It’s not widely available. It is a one-day procedure that is painless, that uses ultrasound energy to identify where cancer is and to ablate it using this ultrasound energy is like a magnifying glass that focuses the sun’s rays on a point that ultrasound energy can kill the prostate cancer.
If you’ve been diagnosed with prostate cancer and you’re taking some thought on how to treat it and you haven’t been given the option of HIFU, it’s definitely something that is probably our most popular reason for people to get a second opinion. This week in our own literature, it was shown that just treating where the tumor is in your prostate called focal therapy, just treating where it is, had equivalent treatment outcomes to radical prostatectomy—a radical surgery.
I’ve been doing robotic surgery for almost 20 years now. This is not something that is new to me or new to our practice, but the idea that we can provide focal therapy for just where your cancer is and give you lower side effects, equivalent treatment outcomes, much easier decision making is something that makes me really happy.
Nutrition Program For Cancer Patients
We have an amazing nutrition program as well. Robert Mendiola, our nutritionist, will put all of our prostate cancer and virtually all of our cancer patients on what we think is a very cancer specific nutrition program. And if you haven’t been given advice about that from either your oncologist or from your urologist or whoever’s diagnosed your cancer, certainly, we have excellent outcomes, ways to follow and wonderful support when it comes to understanding how do patients with cancer, whether they’re treated or not, benefit from a nutritional program.
If you haven’t been given that advice before, I certainly think that you deserve to get that advice. Most of these services are covered by insurance. So, out of pocket costs are not something that are usually a burden to get this information. Really, the burden is whether or not your medical provider has been able to educate themselves or collect the resources necessary to educate you on this particular topic, and of course, spend the time, which is the most valuable kind of resource on earth.
A New Era In Prostate Cancer Treatment
The company that manufactures the machine used in this treatment is right here in Austin: EDAP Technologies. They have agreed to give us really almost exclusive access to this newest of new technologies, HIFU for prostate cancer. It’s quicker, it’s easier, fewer side effects and bigger prostates can be treated. It is a new era in our prostate cancer treatment program.
Being in private practice and not in the academic arena per se, you don’t necessarily always get your hands on just kind of the latest and greatest before everyone else. And the fact that we’re going to be able to do that now and really help, you know, hundreds of men treat their prostate cancer with fewer side effects and equivalent outcomes is something that is really exciting. And we had a patient who came on, we have a whole podcast of him. The side effects he talks about, well, the lack of side effects is pretty impressive. He said he stayed home for a week afterward and it was fine.
Those men that are concerned about their either avoiding radiation or keeping their erectile function and continence, and if you have localized tumors, and especially if you have a tumor that conveyed identified by MRI, this is spectacular. This is MRI fusion technology that we can use to treat your cancer.
If you have questions for Dr. Mistry, email him at armormenshealth@gmail.com.
The transcript has been edited for length and clarity. Listen to the original episode on The Armor Men’s Health Hour podcast.
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