Dealing with TURP

As we age, a lot of things we easily can do when we were younger get harder to do as our bodily systems start to show problems in functioning. That's the case with TURP; and if you add the inevitable side effects of drugs used in treating it, you can only imaging how difficult old age can be.

A CERTAIN practice has been common in synthetic drug treatments (so common it may be considered a cliché).

You start taking a prescription for one health problem and you end up having a new one. Of course that is not true for all synthetic medications. But given lack of long-term studies in most pharmaceutical drugs today, who knows what’s going to happen in the next 20 to 30 years after taking a particular regimen.

In history, many drugs have been pulled out from shelves because they later turned out to be potential killers, if not already one.

The classic case is that of finasteride, a treatment used against certain complications that transurethral resection of prostate (Turp) brings about.

Turp is a surgical intervention to treat acute urinary retention (AUR), a condition in which a person has a very urgent need to urinate but cannot. The physician has to order Turp, especially when patients have difficulty with catheter removal, when medical therapy fails, or when a catheter turns out to be unsuccessful.

Elderly men statistically experience AUR around the average age of 73, according to a 2005 study. In 1999, a study noted 33 percent of men suffered AUR by age 89. Clinical scientists blame this condition to sphere-shaped bacteria, which had been found present in 73 percent of prostate secretion samples studied.

A study published in 2006 (Medscape General Medicine) noted that finasteride has been used to treat many Turp complications. However, it reported that the drug also produces... [READ MORE]

This article appears in SunStar Cebu newspaper on 22 August 2012.

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