Prolong
life without compromising quality of life.
Physicians
– Clinical Approach
Dr. Myers’s clinical approach is simple: when he faces a man in the exam
room at AIDP, his goal is to keep that patient alive as long as possible while
causing the least damage possible.
Dr. Myers believes that the best any doctor can do is master the technology of
medicine so that he or she can educate patients about what is possible for their
specific case. Dr. Myers will outline several treatment paths available to a
patient and then explain the full consequences of each decision. But Dr. Myers
firmly believes that being a physician doesn’t mean he can tell a patient
how to live his life—or how to approach his own disease. Sometimes that
means a man wants to take a less aggressive approach to treating his cancer than
Dr. Myers would choose. Other times it means the man is willing to compromise
his quality of life to a greater degree than Dr. Myers thinks necessary. At AIDP
we treat all men’s philosophies with equal respect and consideration to
design a treatment strategy that fits both their individual cancers and lifestyles.
During this process, Dr. Myers relies on both the results of laboratory and clinical
research as well as the collaboration of his colleagues.
By using a combination of hormonal therapy, radiation therapy, cryotherapy, and
surgery, Myers’s first step is to knock out as much of the cancer as possible
and to stop it from growing. His next concern is the risk of recurrent disease:
in an effort to keep his patients’ cancers dormant for years to come, Dr.
Myers has developed a program that incorporates the Mediterranean Diet, exercise,
stress reduction techniques, and a variety of compounds that have been shown
to slow the growth or progression of prostate cancer. Agents he has used in the
past have included Vitamin D, Proscar, Pomegranate, Leukine, Selenium, and Vitamin
E depending on the patient’s needs and how his cancer responds to treatment.
This program is dynamic: Dr. Myers continually looks for new agents that may
slow or arrest a man’s prostate cancer progression with few side effects;
on the other hand, if the medical literature does not support the use of an agent,
he removes it from the list of techniques he recommends.
