What's NEXT for PROSTATE Health Beyond PSA Testing?

If you've ever had a panic moment after seeing a high PSA test, this one's for you. Because the truth is, a PSA number alone can lie. It can rise from cycling to infection, to inflammation or just aging. And yes, sometimes it can be related to cancer, but everybody's scared because they think it's cancer and it's not. But today, we're going to talk about a much smarter way to test for cancer and to test for prostate cancer, going way beyond the PSA and actually looking at all the cancer risks, because we have a new era in precision prostate health where we can treat the person, not as a number, and give the exact prevention tools that are needed. Hi, I'm Dr. Dino Prado, founder of In Vida Medical Centers. For the last 25 years, my team and I have been blessed to help patients who fail some of the top cancer hospitals across the country. I'll show you the way we can screen prostate cancer using the latest in precision planning and help you with prevention of prostate cancer and even the treatment in early stage and in late stage, all in this one episode. I'm going to do my best to bring it all together and get you the information that can be helpful. So here's what we need to understand. There are hidden drivers to prostate enlargement. First and foremost, let's talk about that. I like to get to the root cause, but it's misunderstood. When men develop lower urinary tract symptoms, frequent urination urgency, nighttime trips to the bathroom, nocturia, weak stream of urine, or incomplete emptying, the reflex assumption is the prostate is enlarged. And that's true for about 50% of men over the age of 60. They can have prostate enlargement, but by age 90, 90% do. So it's something that every man's going to deal with. Let's deal with it here. Let's get some prevention on board and better screening on board so that we can deal with it in the modern era. But the enlargement doesn't automatically mean you have cancer or that it's related to your testosterone and you, in fact, need testosterone. That's not the problem. The real root problem is metabolic syndrome. Again, it's the insulin resistance. It's that metabolic pathway. For decades, we've tried to blame dehydroxy testosterone, which is metabolized from testosterone. But studies have shown that that's not really the whole story. But it can feed cancer, but it isn't the cause of prostate cancer. So I don't want to confuse you here, but I want to Give you a tip. Saw palmetto is still very good to take to shut down growth factors to prevent prostate cancer. Potential growth, but not the cause of it. Prevent hair loss. It reduces the DHT by inhibiting its conversion. So I just want to say something because a lot of people have been told to not take saw palmetto and some of these other herbs that are really good for the prostate, but they actually have benefit. And no, you don't want to get rid of your testosterone because lower testosterone levels are not good for your health. You want normal, healthy levels. There' range for testosterone. I like to be up to the higher normal range because it means you're in good health. And it's not the one that's causing prostate cancer either, at least in my clinical experience. Now it's used in treatment to block it, but it isn't the cause. So let's talk about that cause. It's the insulin. It's the poor diet, the inflammation, the visceral fat. That's all coming from the sad diet that everybody's eating. And so we can get rid of that, get rid of the inflammation and start using antioxidants, anti inflammatory approaches and moving the prostate. The prostate can become stagnant. If you think of the prostate gland, it doesn't get a lot of movement and it's hard to move Things in that area gets stagnant. In fact, one of the treatments we use in integrative medicine sometimes is we'll inject a tiny bit of methylene blue into the prostate gland as a prevention to kind of kill out any infection, oxygenate the tissue, help the mitochondria in prevention of prostate cancer, because such a high population of men will get it. So I want you to understand that when we're talking about prostate cancer, it comes back to insulin. Too much insulin in the blood. Insulin is an anabolic hormone, meaning it grows things. And that includes prostate, prostate cancer, really, all cancers, ovari, breast, colon, I can go on. All linked to insulin problems. So men with metabolic syndrome, like central obesity, hypertension, high glucose and low testosterone have a significantly higher risk for bph, benign prosthetic hyperplasia. And this can advance into prostate cancer. One study found that fasting insulin levels correlated directly with prostate volume, lower urinary traxis symptoms. So the real root driver, the same thing that fuels heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and all the above, is this chronic insulin level. So we want to get there. So go back into test the lpir. This is the test I like. Don't focus so much on ldl and cholesterol, because we need cholesterol. It's important for hormones, it's important for immunity. It's the lpir. We want to see what our insulin levels are in relationship to our health and our resistance so we can get the right diet, lifestyles to get those numbers back in order. You can do a 16, 8, intermittent fasting, get rid of all the refined carbohydrates and sugars, you know that. And eat high quality proteins, grass fed beef, organic foods the color of the rainbow and gut microbiome, fermented foods. Now let's move on because I think you got the diet down and I've done other episodes on that. But I want you to look at the prostate as an insulin inflammation area, not just as I'm going to get a test and then treat the prostate cancer, but we'll go into this. So let's go into the screening now. Let's go beyond the psa. In Europe, they've also been pushing tests that are called the PSE instead of the psa. But the PSA was once revolutionary, but today it's outdated. It's as a standalone test. It's prostate specific, not cancer specific. And elevations happen with prostatitis infections, benign enlargement, recent ejaculation or cycling, even inflammation from diet and stress. And that's what I was talking about, the diet and stress part that we can get under control. And on autopsy studies show that up to 47% of elderly men, even those dying of other causes, have microscopic prostate cancer that never caused any harm. So chasing the PSA number can lead to over diagnosis, unnecessary biopsies and even life changing surgeries that we don't want, like the da Vinci surgeries. We want to avoid that. The second thing I want you to know is that when you diagnose prostate cancer, do not start any treatment, robotic surgery or anything else without understanding what your circulating tumor cells are and your methylation score. Oftentimes the cancer has not metastasized, but you need to know if it has. You may even run a PET scan. This will help you to see if it's spread. Physicians don't run this and it's a huge mistake because if we can see it spread, it changes the entire treatment plan. Here's why. If it's spread, we need to get other targeting on board and get the immune system enacted and stop removing things with surgery. Even after men remove their prostate and go through these da Vinci surgeries, they'll have urinary incontinence for a year ed hot flashes. And 30 of these return years later because of this poor testing that I just mentioned. So in Europe, they've tried to bring in this new test called the PSE now, not the PSA, the PSE. Now this is the next generation PSA combining PSA with five 3D epigenetic biomarkers linked to prostate cancer with an accuracy that's pretty high, jumping from 55% to 94%, but with only an 86% sensitivity. So I'm going to tell you that there's a better way. And I just saw a physician do a whole presentation on this and I thought, why are they bothering even just testing for, for this? Because today we have tests that can test for all cancers with one blood test and 98% accuracy. And that's what I call the full smart stack. This is the modern approach. I recommend this for breast cancer. Get rid of the mahmogram, run the blood based multi cancer screen. That allows you to look at 50 plus cancers and really all the major cancers with 98% accuracy. That's powerful because now we're not just looking at prostate, we're looking colon, lung, all the cancer. Because the earlier you diagnose the cancer, so much easier it is to treat. So don't just test the psa. I would do these multi cancer detection tests, which is from a simple blood test. If that's positive, now we know we have a signal. And that signal from that blood test will guide us to run other tests like imaging. We haven't even done a biopsy yet. We can do an MP MRI of the prostate, which helps identify clinical significant lesions and reduce unnecessary biopsy we can do. Now if we see something there, we can run a PET scan, circulating tumor cells, methylation scores, to see if the cancer at a cellular level has metastasized past the prostate. Otherwise there isn't anything we need to do yet. At this moment, we don't need to the treatment. We don't have to rush the surgical removal. These cancers typically grow super slow and there's so much we can do to get rid of them. I tell patients that if we can spot these early, the likely cause of death won't even be prostate cancer. We got to watch out for heart disease and other things, which is why you want to get your insulin sensitivity back in check, because it's related to all the major horsemen. But getting right back to what I was saying is now we have imaging, now we can see it. So what is the treatment we do from here? Very simple. We use 3D cone beam image guided. So you're on a table image guided, using a catheter the size of your hair, going in through the blood supply right to the prostate, into the tumor, giving it the immunotherapy to kill the cancer, then seal the blood supply and come out. Now you've created a systemic immune response, killed the cancer, and now diet, lifestyle, immunity, with a focus on immunity, strengthening the immune system and then testing these leading indicators way before you would ever see a tumor reemerge with imaging. But here's the difference. Unlike the surgical removal, which completely ignores immunity, completely ignores the cause of the cancer, completely ignores the inflammation, this model, because it involves deep testing, takes all of that into account. Now. Now you have the DNA next generation sequence. Hundreds of markers, thousands plus markers with the RNA transcriptomics, and you can see where the cancer is going and the immune spatial biology. So let me give you this analogy which I give all the time. It's like an aerial view. The next generation sequence shows you the car driving down the city. The RNA shows you all the streets and where the cancer would go and mutate and change. So you get to block them and change them? Yes. Diet, lifestyle, natural agents and targeted treatments, on and off label drugs. But then you get the spatial biology, which looks at the immune system. You can see the gangs around the immune system that are blocked, blocking the police, your natural killer cells, from getting to the tumor and changing that. When you have that kind of information, you kind of know what's going on. So now you can be precise, go to the tumor. You don't have to have chemo going everywhere in the body. You don't have to have surgery with recovery. Nope. This is very simple, very targeted, very effective. You can skip, for the most part, urinary incontinence and ED and other complications that we just don't see. With 3D cone beam targeted care, you can avoid the robotic prostectomy with all the possible side effects or the lack of stimulating the immune system. And then you monitor the cancer and you get the diet and lifestyle opt track. So you're not only preventing cancer now, but diabetes, heart disease and type 3 diabetes, Alzheimer's and dementia with changing our diet and lifestyle, inflammation and insulin receptor sensitivity. See, this is the power. We're not going in to treat the prostate with 20 or 24 data points. We're using a thousand plus data points and we're targeted and we're in and out with 100% visibility so we don't hit the wrong area and we don't have the complications the way we see with the other procedures. This is what we've seen in our clinical experience be very effective. Now let's talk about the integrative natural support along with prostate. Your prostate health lives and dies with your metabolic terrain. So we want to get that insulin under control, the inflammation, and that's antioxidants. Curcumin. There's a lot of wonderful things you can do here to decrease inflammation. Boswellia, these are all great herbs that can lower inflammation in general. But when we're dealing with the prostate, there's one of the most powerful things is lycopene. And you know how you get lycopene in the diet? Tomatoes. I'm Italian and we know how to use tomatoes. I'm going to give you a simple recipe which I think you can eat multiple times a week very easily. Get the cherry red tomatoes. They're really sweet, beautiful. Rinse them, clean them. You can eat them alongside anything. You put them in the blender with a little olive oil, garlic, and put it on your favorite salmon or whatever high quality meat you like. These kinds of things are going to be great. Now if you're an Italian out there, you're going to say, where's the pasta? Well, maybe once in a while you can have a little bit of pasta. Look for good products out there. But typically we want to reduce that high carbohydrate diet and we want to look at foods that are easier for our bodies to digest and to decrease insulin resistance. But if it's once a week and it's your Sunday meal, it's okay once in a while, right? We don't want to get to the point where we're so restrictive that we remove everything out of our life. We want to get the refined sugars out, the processed carbs out, eat nutrient dense foods and create a healthy, strong immune system to promote prostate health. Here's the other one. Deep sleep immunity, sleep recovery, it's all in sleep. Muscle recovery, it's all in sleep. So I like melatonin. Here you can start with 20 milligrams. In the clinic, we go up to 200 milligrams under supervision and we even give it intravenously in high doses because melatonin helps with stress reduction, with sleep, it helps with immunity. It has some powerful promising benefits in cancer. And that's why. So taking little melatonin, if you tolerate it well, could be a very nice treatment, even in prevention has some anti tumor immune modulatory properties. It's Not a standalone treatment, but it's supportive. And all these little supportive things that we do every day, go to bed at the same hour every night. Let's say it's 10 o', clock, stop watching the movies and the devices. Go to bed, wake up at the same time, go outside, get the light in your eyes so you reset the rhythm for the next evening. These things are powerful. If you have a hard time waking up in the middle of the night, try eating a little bit of protein before you go to bed in the evening. Evening, you have this good glucose through the night so your glucose doesn't go down. You don't get hypoglycemic and wake up. So that's something else. And if you're wearing like an oil ring that checks glucose or one of these new smart watches that check glucose and blood pressure, you can see that over a couple nights of sleep. And then just adjust your diet through eating healthy foods. Your glucose is staying beautiful, your blood pressure is staying beautiful, your antioxidants are staying beautiful. And you add a little melatonin. It helps you with immunity. See, we're moving in the right direction. Add some beta glucans from the mushrooms, matake, reishi, shiitake, all these or lion's mane, chaga. These are all great. They'll stimulate your natural killer cells, your T cells. This is a great way for us to really improve our prostate health. It's really important. Increase your tomatoes. Lycopene. It has one of the greatest decreases in the enlargement of the prostate. 21% reduction in risk of prostate cancer. So as an Italian, I'm speaking to you. Tomatoes are wonderful. Eat them. Tomatoes going to help a lot because that's a huge decrease. It beats even most of the herbs and its benefit. And I gave you that nice little recipe of which you can use. Let's look at some other key supp because I want to give you some high yield things you can do. You're always going to hear me talk about green tea, egcg. Great. It helps decrease the psa. So you can use that and you can put all these things by the way, in your AI, GPT, Grok, Gemini, whatever you like. And it'll give you a full program. Diet, lifestyle, recommended supplements. These will all help. Stinging nettles is a natural anti inflammatory. It's really good to decrease psa. Natural aromatase inhibitors. What are these? These are the things that shifting your testosterone from going into estrogen, which happens so commonly, especially when people are obese. They have visceral fat, you can use rye grass. Polle can use Myomin, one of the great Chinese supplements. Works fantastic for some men, taking two capsules a day can really help. These are going to be powerful with saw palmetto. Even though sal palmetto, it has a natural anti inflammatory property and it decreases the risks of other factors that are involved in cancer growth. So I think it has an overall benefit. So taking a good prostate supplement that we use as physicians is always a good idea. Get your vitamin D levels up, not at the low level, the high level. Get your zinc levels up and keep your hormones balanced. Balance, do not let go of your testosterone. Get it in a nice healthy range. Decrease your sex binding globulin. So work with a good integrative doctor to kind of coordinate all of these things. And this is the way that you can build a natural program that balances everything from aromatase inhibitors. You can take a little dim endol, three carbinol, cruciferous vegetables, brussels sprouts, broccoli, cauliflower, calcium D glucarate, these are all going to help your liver, all detoxify, support those pathways. And one of my favorites is glutathione. Find a good bioavailable glutathione. This will help. And as I mentioned, methylation, you can try it in low doses. It's absorbed pretty well. Of course, if you find a good integrative doctor, just a little bit introduced directly to the prostate, especially as you get older, and then directly, maybe using a little photodynamic therapy with a little red light therapy right to the prostate and for just even a couple of minutes, five to seven minutes can have an impact on resetting that stagnation of the prostate and improving the immunity and oxygenation of the pan of the prostate, getting rid of some of that inflammation and precancerous cells. So these are just clinical pearls that you can do in a preventative strateg. But you need to be working with a good doctor who works in the space of integrative medicine and understand that these therapies are not standard by any means. They're integrative, but they can be supportive and if done correctly can help patients. So this is part of the playbook. Let's get the diet right, let's get the insulin under control, let's make sure we're not just doing psa. We're using a multi cancer early detection screening. If we got it, we move to MRI and if we do, we're going to use 3D cone beam. We're going to Avoid surgery. We're going to spot treat it if it's metastasized. And we build a full treatment plan, all of it using thousand plus markers, not 24. We're going to use natural, natural agents like glycopene and tomatoes, EGCG from like green tea, boswellia, dim garlic, these are all fantastic things. Cayenne pepper, these are all helpful things you can do. And if we have a cancer there, we're going to get rid of it, we're going to try to eliminate it with 3D cone beam, go straight to tumor, cut the blood supply, avoid the urinary incontinence, avoid the ed, keep our health strong, keep our testosterone healthy. All these things to live a vibrant life as a man. We don't want to be stuck with getting our prostate removed and spread of disease with a 30% risk. We want to try to avoid that. Getting our blood sugar in proper balance is going to make a huge difference for all the horsemen, all the big ones, heart disease, diabetes, cancer, et cetera. Do not over focus on ldl. Just make sure you're eating healthy fats. And if you have one of those genetic risks of cholesterol, okay, maybe you monitor it, but we want to look at the quality of the fats. Are they good quality or are they small particles? Well, you can do that with tests. You want to make sure your hormones are balanced and you want to support anti inflammatory throughout the body. This is important precision screening, multi cancer testing because we're going to look for more than one and we're going to help get rid of all the cancers in our life and give ourselves good quality health and energy. We can monitor this with good testing. We can even wear smart devices, check our glucose, blood pressure, heart rate, variability, sleep. Dial all those things in and find what works for you. This will help add to your longevity. I hope this was helpful and not be afraid of cancer because if you can test these things early, we can get rid of them with precision and avoid a lot of the side effects and improve your quality of life. May the Lord bless you on your journey to healing. Bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum.