Prostate Cancer Strategy

The old joke that most men will die with prostate cancer rather than from it turns out to be pretty correct. Though we often hear about men undergoing surgery or some other conventional treatment for prostate cancer, such as radiation, we hear much less about the alternative medicine strategy. An exception is the recent statement by radio celebrity Don Imus that he is using a diet and exercise approach to address his prostate cancer. Imus says he eats mainly uncooked, organic foods such as raw sauerkraut, flaxseed and very hot peppers and, after several months on this diet, that this approach has stopped his cancer from spreading.

There is an abundant amount of medical research to support the alternative medicine approach. In fact, there is considerable support for not reacting quickly to a diagnosis of prostate cancer by choosing a surgical or conventional treatment solution, which can have substantial side effects. Consider this: The most recent report from the US Federal Government's Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality that reviewed592 published articles and compared eight prostate cancer treatment strategies concluded "it's questionable whether the many cases of prostate cancer detected by the PSA test should even be treated." In other words, for many men with prostate cancer, especially older ones, no action may make sense.

An important statistic is relative survival rate, which measures the percentage of men who do not die from prostate cancer after it is found. For allmen with prostate cancer, according to the American Cancer Society, the relative five-year survival rate is 100 percent and the relative 10-year survival rate is 91 percent. Over 15 years, the relative survival rate is 76 percent. You can begin to see that the older a man is, the more the alternative medicine approach makes sense.

Indeed, considerable research which does not get enough attention shows that diet and nutrition can be effective in treating prostate cancer. For example, an article this year in the Journal of Human Nutrition and Dietetics presented a strong case for "a diet low in fat, high in vegetables and fruits, and avoiding high energy intake, excessive meat, excessive dairy products and calcium intake." And an article in the Clinical Cancer Research journal found dietary long-chain omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids, that are in common fish oil supplements, appear protective for aggressive prostate cancer and may impact prostate inflammation and carcinogenesis.

Years earlier Dr. Dean Ornish, who became famous for proving that diet and nutrition can prevent and treat heart disease, also addressed prostate cancer. His approach was based on the view that many plant foods--certain vegetables, tomato products, and soy--seem to reduce the risk of prostate cancer and many animal foods--namely milk, cheese, eggs, fish and other meat--have been shown to increase the risk of dying from prostate cancer.

Ornish took patients who already had cancer and fed them a strictly plant-based diet--"predominantly fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes and soy products." Ornish found 93 men with early biopsy-proven prostate cancer who volunteered to forgo radiation, chemo and surgery. One group were put on a strictly plant-based diet along with other healthy behaviors such as walking 30 minutes six days a week, while a control group just watched and waited. A year later the results were published in the September 2005 issue of the Journal of Urology, the official journal of the American Urological Association.

By the end of the year-long study, six of the control group patients had dropped out because their tumors were growing. MRI's or diagnostic tests of cancer activity showed that their tumors were growing at such a rate that they decided they could wait no longer and opted for a combination of radical surgery, chemotherapy or radiation. But, none of the vegan diet group had this problem. Even more impressive was this: Average cancer activity increased in the control group, as measured by PSA tests, but it decreased in the lifestyle modification group. "This is the first randomized trial showing that the progression of prostate cancer can be stopped or perhaps even reversed by changing diet and lifestyle alone," Ornish told the Washington Post.

Why did this alternative approach work? Ornish and his colleagues looked at how blood taken from the cancer patients at the year's end impacted cancer cells. Blood from those that did nothing but watch and wait reduced cancer cell growth by only 9 percent. In contrast, blood from those who had been on the plant-based diet inhibited cancer growth 70 percent, an amazing difference. The closer the patients stuck to the program, the more their own cancer seemed to be declining and the better their own blood was at killing cancer cells in the lab test.

Typical side-effects of conventional prostate cancer treatments are impotence and incontinence. What were the side-effects of the diet and lifestyle group? There was a major improvement in their cholesterol--dramatically decreasing the risk of these men dying from a heart attack. The patients also reported improvement in their quality of life overall.

Despite these results, urologists and mainstream media articles on prostate cancer rarely pay attention to the alternative medicine approach that Don Imus has adopted.