Prostate Disease Begs Understanding
Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text.
- KEYWORDS:
- prostatic diseases
Washington—Sometimes a diagnosis is a dead end, a label with little guidance. So it goes with chronic prostatitis—also called chronic pelvic pain syndrome, the newer term—which prompts some 2 million office visits in the United States each year (J Urol. 1998;159:1224-1228).
A catch-all term to describe an array of symptoms that include pain in various places, urinary problems, and sexual dysfunction, "prostatitis" reflects a lack of knowledge regarding origins and effective treatments that led urologist Thomas Stamey, MD, to call the diagnosis a "wastebasket of clinical ignorance."
To illustrate the point, Leroy Nyberg, MD, PhD, head of urology research at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK), sketched a typical scenario: a man complains of prostate symptoms and, after ruling out obvious bacterial infections, urethral strictures, bladder disorders, and cancer, the physician shrugs his shoulders, calls it chronic nonbacterial prostatitis, and prescribes an antibiotic like …
