Something old and something new

In the "good old days", when we had an elderly man who couldn't survive surgery for prostate cancer, we'd give him female hormones, usually a type of estrogen.

It slowed the cancer growth, was cheap, and often in slow growing prostate cancer (and most elderly prostate cancer grows slowly) they died of something else.

Then someone checked, and found the reason they died of something else was that the estrogen increased their rate of heart attack and strokes. (not to mention ruining their love life, but hey, they were in their seventies, so too old to care)...

Estrogen increase the stickiness of blood, so if you have a partial blockage, it might clot closed...which, by the way, is the same "side effect" of Vioxx, which is now touted as killing people...

So instead of estrogen, we give a shot of GRNH antagonist. This turns off the hormone from the brain that turns on testosterone, which makes the cancer grow. Usually after a year, if there is no evidence of cancer, they stop it and voila, sex comes back...

Of course, this has side effects, like depression...I took a lower dose of a similar shot, to shrink non cancerous tumors and endometriosis. So now I warn the guys that "I took that damn shot and cried for three months, so if you get down, let me know and we can try prozac"...about half of the men do ask for it.

However, one side effect is thinning of the bones. Now, in older women we used estrogen-- until last year, when the powers that rule decided that this caused heart attacks and told us to stop it...to the detriment of a lot of women. What if they get hot flashed and depression? Why, just use prozac...except that a lot of studies now hysterically point out that some very depressed people who take prozac kill themselves (and a small percentage of people who are mildly bipolar or have mild attention deficit disorder get bad reactions)...and what none of these PC studies ask is: would women prefer to keep their bottoms young and healthy, and their husbands happy, even though there is a tiny risk of heart attack? (I usually tell them take an extra aspirin, and that the risk is small).

Ah, but now instead of cheap female hormones we have expensive patches...which do not go thru the liver but let the hormone straight to the bloodstream...and voila, less thinning of bone...and now we are told that the patches prevent a "common side effect" of the cancer treatment...

So now we are back to how we treated prostate cancer thirty years ago...female hormones.

No report if their wives prefer husbands who risk of a broken hip but with a working you know what.

After all, 70 is not what it used to be....