How to Avoid BPH Treatment & Prostate Pills
BPH treatment advice will depend on the type and severity of symptoms, how small or large your prostate is, how much it stuffs up your life style on a daily basis, other medical conditions, your age and your family history. In medical terms you might hear these 3 options:
- Watch and wait or Medication - this page
- Less invasive heat treatment – TUMT, TUNA, temporary stenting
- More invasive surgical treatments - TUIP, TURP, Laser
Treatment for bph might begin with 'Watch and Wait'
The question at this time is, 'how advanced is my disease and how much has my prostate grown already'? A urine test looking for the presence of red blood cells, a DRE (digital rectal exam) and then possibly an ultrasound to determine size, will give a bottom line for further testing.
Watch and wait seems a useless exercise though if you are waiting for things to get worse. How stressful is that? What if you are worse at the end of a waiting period? You can’t turn the clock back to change your mind and do something different with that time. Try to do something different now and aim for a better outcome or at the very least more watch and wait, to push bph treatment further into the future.
This is a period of time you and your doctor might agree to, if the extent of disease is not too severe and you feel that prostate symptoms are manageable or might improve with life style changes (click to download a pdf page).
A rising PSA level in regular blood tests could be another monitoring factor. However, this is a test for early screening of prostate cancer which is not related to BPH. Although PSA is raised during BPH it does not indicate severity. Risk factors for these separate conditions are the same, so it is a question of eliminating prostate cancer so that benign prostatic hyperplasia treatment can be planned.
There is also a chance that sleep apnoea (or a simple urinary tract infection) could be the real reason you end up at the toilet during the night (nocturia). At this watch and wait stage, it’s worth thinking about.
If this were the case, you might avoid bph treatment altogether, depending on the results of your diagnostic tests and other life style habits.
Watch and wait could be a truly valuable opportunity to be proactive and aim for prevention of further problems and more serious life interrupting treatment. There might also be other health factors to take care of in this period of time.
Medication / Prostate Pills for bph Treatment
In the meantime, medical prostate pills may relieve symptoms while you consider what might come next if they don’t. Supplements or vitamins for prostate health could be a supporting option while you begin to make dietary changes. Following are the types of medication you could be offered.
- Alpha 1-blockers relax the muscles of the bladder neck and prostate, allowing the urethra to remain open and so improve the flow of urine. These medications are also used to treat high blood pressure as they can relax smooth muscle around veins and bring blood pressure down. Side effects at high doses are dizziness and sometime problems with ejaculation, usually temporary and reversible.
- Androgen inhibitors lower hormone levels, reduce the size of the prostate gland and increase urine flow rate. It may take 3 to 6 months before symptom improvement and side effects at higher doses may relate to sexual ability.
- Antibiotics may relieve symptoms of enlarged prostate if prescribed for chronic prostatitis (inflammation of the prostate due to infection) existing alongside BPH. Depending on the bacteria strain, a full course of antibiotics might last for one week or one month.
.
If, unfortunately, watching and waiting or prostate pills aren’t helping much and symptoms are becoming more serious then surgical bph treatments are categorised as either less invasive or more invasive.
Part 1- Watch and Wait / Medication (top of this page)
Part 2 - Less Invasive Heat Treatment
Part 3 - TURP or TUIP (more invasive)
back to home page
