By Howard Wolinsky and Mark Lichty

By Howard Wolinsky What a difference a decade makes. In 2010, 217,000 American men were diagnosed with prostate cancer. About half — 105,5000 — had low-risk cancer. I was one of those men. Let’s break it down further. Of the 105,500 with low-risk cancer, 90–94% then opted for treatment, primarily…

By Howard Wolinsky and Mark Lichty We were stunned on November 6 when beloved NBC weatherman Al Roker revealed on the Today Show that he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer and would be undergoing surgery in a few weeks. Our hearts go out to him and his family, “It’s…

Maybe less than you think. By Howard Wolinsky Guidelines, schmuidelines. It seems that guidelines from major medical groups are made to be broken. This is new news for me. We patients apparently take them more seriously than the sheriffs and undersheriffs of medicine who apply them — often loosely, somewhat based on what the patient market is saying. …

By Howard Wolinsky

Could the presidential candidate and war hero have been a candidate for active surveillance? By Howard Wolinsky U.S. Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kansas), 98, an unsuccessful GOP candidate for president in 1996 against Bill Clinton and a World War II hero, has died after a battle with Stage 4 lung cancer, his wife Elizabeth announced in a tweet on Sunday (Dec. 5). Almost forgotten in…

By Howard Wolinsky Back in the early 20-teens, Associate Prof. Jeremy Grummet, MD, then a junior consultant in urology at The Alfred Hospital, Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, recalls men who had undergone transrectal biopsies frequently becoming septic. “It would be an unusual week if there wasn’t at least one patient who was…

How an Oslo hairdresser changed medical practice in Norway and beyond after her father died from a transrectal biopsy By Howard Wolinsky On Tuesday, February 25, 2018, Roar Gulbrandsen, 68, a stonemason from Oslo, Norway, underwent a routine transrectal biopsy after pathologists detected three suspicious prostate lesions following surgery for an enlarged prostate. The next day Gulbrandsen worked on a renovation job. During the course of the day, he…

United We Fall, Divided We Stand: Division between high- and low-risk prostate cancer patients? By Howard Wolinsky Active surveillance for men with low-risk cancers has been the Rodney Dangerfield of urology. …