A Look At The Prostate

A Look at the Prostate

Imagine a little bucket sitting inside your bellyÐ'ÐŽÐ'Єthat's your bladder. Now picture, right below the bucket, a tiny chestnutÐ'ÐŽÐ'Єthat's your prostate. There's a tube running out the bottom of the bucket, right down through the middle of the chestnut, top to bottom -- that tube is your urethra. Water continually collects in your bladder (bucket). Every so often the muscles at the bottom of your bladder open up, while the muscles surrounding the bladder contract, squirting the urine into the urethra (tube) which runs through the prostate (chestnut) and continues through the penis, all the way to the tip and out of the body.

The chestnut-shaped prostate sits right below the bladder and is wrapped around the urethra, but it has nothing to do with a man's urinary apparatus. The prostate happens to be where it is only because it's needed for ejaculation, and the ejaculate passes through the same urethra as the urine does. That's why the prostate sits below the bladder, and that's why prostate problems interfere with a man's ability to urinate and to have sex.

Figure 1. Male anatomy

One of the prostate's main duties is to create the seminal fluid which mixes with and carries sperm out of the penis upon ejaculation. The prostate also helps to pump the semen and sperm with sufficient power out of a man's body on its way to fertilizing a woman's egg. This means that the prostate functions as both a gland and as a muscle.

The prostate is also the nerve and emotional center of a man's sex life and sexuality. It is the feeling center for sexual pleasures, disappointments, stresses, feelings of inadequacy, immorality, hates, and dislikes. Unreleased emotions of this nature, stored in the prostate, are an important source of prostate problems.

What Goes Wrong

Three main types of problemsÐ'ÐŽÐ'Єinfection, enlargement, and cancerÐ'ÐŽÐ'Єcan afflict the prostate. Prostate infections, called prostatitis, are fairly common in men from the teen years on. These infections can be brief or long-lasting, mild or severe, easy or difficult to treat. Symptoms of prostatitis can include frequent and/or painful urination, other urinary difficulties, or pain during sex.

Prostate enlargement, called benign prostatic hyperplaisia, or BPH for short, is an unwanted but non-cancerous enlargement of the prostate. Although men in their twenties can suffer from BPH, it usually surfaces later in life. It's estimated that half of all men have BPH by the age of 60, and 90% will suffer from it by age 85. If the prostate enlarges outward, a man probably won't know he has BPH (unless it grows upward and pushes into the bladder). But if it swells inward, squeezing the urethra which passes through the center of the gland, he will know there's a problem. With the prostate squeezing down on the urinary tube, a man can suffer from hesitancy in urinating, straining to start the stream, a weak urinary stream, starting and stopping of the urine, dribbling of urine before and after urinating, frequent urination, getting up several times at night to urinate, or urgency of urination (a feeling that he has to go right now). He may also suffer from incomplete urination, which means that he can't completely empty his bladder, and possibly incontinence as well.

Although prostatitis and BPH can, in advanced cases, be quite dangerous, the most serious prostate problem is cancer. Cancer of the prostate is the second most frequently diagnosed cancer in males (after skin cancer), and the second most frequent cause of cancer death in males (after lung cancer). Approximately 200,000 American men will get the unhappy diagnosis of prostate cancer this year alone -- and 38,000 will die of the disease. No one is quite sure how many other men have prostate cancer and are not aware of it. Autopsy studies of men who died of other causes suggest that by age 50 or so, 30% of all men have undetected prostate cancer. And autopsies show that by age 90, the majority of men have it; it simply never grew or didn't grow large enough to get their attention.

Symptoms

Men usually don't know that they have prostate cancer for quite some time after the malignancy takes root, because it produces