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Decision time SBRT, IMRT or surgery
Prostate Cancer | Last Active: 10 hours ago | Replies (57)Comment receiving replies
@harvey33 You're struggling because it's impossible to have enough information in advance to make the optimal choice. It's only afterwards that you discover whether surgery or radiation caused difficult side-effects (and even then, the other might have been worse).
There's just too much variation post-surgery/radiation from person to person to select one logically; otherwise, they wouldn't be offering both of them to you. Everyone who shares their experiences with you here is working from a sample size of 1.
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@harvey33 I was "lucky" that I didn't have to choose: my cancer had already escaped to my spine, and they don't offer prostatectomy as an option for metastatic cancer.
In fact, they didn't used to offer radiation either — the assumption was that we'd be dead in a very few years, so there was no point putting us through that — but then new research showed that together with doublet therapy and MDT (metastasis-directed therapy), PDRT (prostate-directed radiotherapy) was highly effective at stalling oligometastatic prostated cancer, sometimes indefinitely, so standard of care is starting to change.