Health and Prostate

The Department of Urology of the New York Hospital
(Given January 31, 1941)

Attention is called to the effect of disease of the prostate gland in the young as well as the old.

Young men are liable to acute and chronic inflammation of the prostate, sometimes producing abscess, requiring surgery, but more often causing low back pain, urinary disturbances, and sexual disturbances. Non-surgical treatment is indicated in the latter; this consists of massage, urethral dilatation, urethrovesical irrigations, chemotherapy, hydrotherapy, diathermy, and other forms of physiotherapy. Tuberculosis of the prostate occurs fairly frequently in young men, and is usually part of a progressive urogenital tuberculosis. Treatment, as a rule, is non-surgical. Sarcoma of the prostate, a rare disease that is almost invariably fatal, affects young men and even children relatively often.

Appropriate diet and medication are indicated in all prostatic conditions.

Older men are subject to prostatic calculosis, and all forms of obstructive prostatism, both benign and malignant. Appropriate surgical methods must be applied after careful investigation has revealed the exact conditions that prevail.

In less than 5 per cent of cases of carcinoma of the prostate gland is the malignancy discovered in time to effect a cure by total extirpation. This is because there are no symptoms in early stages of the disease. It is therefore an important duty of the general practitioner and the family doctor to do a rectal examination on every male patient over 50 years of age, and to investigate thoroughly every case in which the prostate is not perfectly normal.