Why Aggressive Prostate Cancer is Different from Slow Progressing Prostate Cancer | Dr. A Explains

Today I'm answering a question which has so long of an answer, and what I want to do is give you a snapshot of the answer to encapsulate it. The topic is— Hey, it's Dr. A. Welcome to my YouTube channel. I've been teaching and researching in the world of integrative and naturopathic medicine for 30 years now, and I've been seeing patients for decades, and I use this platform to answer questions. So please know that number one, this is about, you know, a very common topic. About a topic that is not a lot of fun to talk about, and it's a topic that there's a lot more we could say, but I just want to make some big points. And it came from some questions that came. I was interviewed on a podcast about a certain type of prostate cancer, and that is the aggressive, rapidly growing prostate cancer. And on the podcast, what came up was that I consider in the patients I see or the ones I consult on 2 kinds of prostate cancer. There is the slower growing or very slow-growing, more common, thankfully, kind, which most people have. And of course it's cancer, nobody wants it, but that's sort of one type of cancer. Then there is the rapidly progressive, aggressive prostate cancer. So what I want to answer on this one is why are they different? Like, why did my friend who had prostate cancer get some basic treatment and monitoring and they've never really progressed? Or my other friend, kind of, they caught it fairly early and they did a little more aggressive treatment. And and they're kind of in you know stable disease, like they've got some disease but it's not going anywhere. Why is prostate cancer so different? What we want to talk about here are big picture things. So excluding the forms that are early caught, slow growing, very responsive to treatment, there is a second type of prostate cancer, which is the high-grade, high-stage aggressive form. And what I have found clinically and then what I have found in the research is that the aggressive prostate cancers have a cancer component. So what I want to do in this answer is talk about what are the other things beyond cancer that make the aggressive prostate cancers so aggressive. They fall into a couple of categories, but think of them as pouring gasoline on a fire that you're trying to put out. That's the wrong direction. The first area, which has a great deal of published research, but it's all over the map, is infections. Now, What they were originally doing with this research was trying to look and say, is there infections we should look for as a sign that someone might get prostate cancer? But really, if you look at all of the data and all of the research, every time they look at a category of infectious agent, whether it's fungal or viral or bacterial, et cetera, they find groupings of different types of infectious agents that are associated with aggressive prostate cancer. So it's less about probably that bug causing the prostate cancer, and it's more about they're pouring gas on the fire. Well, how are they doing that? The infections are often resident in and around the prostate, seminal vesicles, all of the apparatus down there, and even the local lymph nodes, et cetera. But what would an infection do? Well, it depends what kind. Viral infections could actually change the nuclear activity in the cells and make them more prone to cancer. We know that from cervical cancer, et cetera. Viral infections, bacterial infections, fungal infections, protozoal infections, other things though, also associated with advanced aggressive prostate cancer, also keep the fire going by altering the milieu in which the cancer cells live, meaning they make it a pro-cancer milieu because they are infectious and there may be an immune war going on that creates an infectious immunologic situation that is pro-cancer. That's a very grand simplification of that, but that's another reason for it. So you have direct and indirect reasons, but infections, and it's not just one type of infection, it's every time they go looking under different categories of infection, they find them associated with these aggressive prostate cancers. The next area that keeps the fire going through other chemical means are toxic exposures. What we have found over the years, and there's also data to support this, but we certainly certainly noticed it as a trend long ago, was that our patients that would have that aggressive prostate cancer that would blow through the treatment, so we would have to do all this other treatment with them, often had, you know, career-long or very highly punctuated exposures to chemical toxicants, some metal toxicants, and potentially other toxicants, but mostly chemicals and metals as far as we know right now. There's also a subcategory that has less research on it, which are biotoxins, which would be like mold mycotoxins. And that's because some of Those are actually immune suppressants. So if you put an immune suppressant in and your immune system's trying to, you know, push back on a cancer, it may work out such that the immune system stops pushing back and then the cancer can flourish. But what about the other things like chemical or metal exposures? Chemical and metal exposures are well-known proto-oncogenes, or really epigenetic manipulators of the oncogenome that would then trigger cancer to go on. Now, what that means is if you epigenetically trigger a cancer with a, you know, chemical metal toxin, and there's some direct triggers too, but let's just stick with epigenetics for a second, then what will happen is that the genomic milieu that is also supposed to be protecting you and keeping balance around the prostate cancer cells is now turned on in a way where it's actually either pro-cancer or it's anti-surveillance. And you can do this with other things too, but toxins through the epigenetic triggering mechanisms are a big way that you either turn on a pro-cancer chemical milieu, kind of like the, you know, the infections do, et cetera, or you turn off a surveillance and anti-cancer mechanism that is genetic and on the inside of you. So infectious agents and toxins are probably the 2 biggest things that we have found in our aggressive cancer patients where those things have to be treated as aggressively as Any other thing that you might do, and sometimes, especially if the cancer is not discovered until it's very high stage, high grade, and later, you may or may not have time to deal with those things. But the bottom line is, if you don't have the first type of prostate cancer we talked about, which is early stage, grade, slow growing, we stop the growth, whatever, all the good ones, and you have an aggressive prostate cancer that is seeming to work through all. Of the standard treatments, you need to take a step back and look at what could be pouring gas on the fire and what can you do to work with an integrative cancer practitioner to work on these other areas. Obviously you have to work on the cancer too, but you need to work with somebody who can maybe come in alongside and work on helping you decrease the amount of toxins that are coming in your body, but also increase the amount that are leaving your body. Work with somebody who can work with either immunologically or through other means to beat down, you know, find first and then beat down the infections that are already there and a number of other things. Now there's other areas that will trigger this aggressive prostate cancer increase that are, you know, secondarily related, but really the infectious milieu and the toxic milieu are are really at the top of the pyramid and everything else kind of follows after that. Also comes, you know, it's important to treat, but it kind of comes after those things. So it's not that you don't treat the prostate cancer as an aggressive prostate cancer, whatever that means for the oncology part, but it also means that we have a lot of work to clean up around the prostate cancer. So we give the immune system more of a chance to fight. And in the patients that we've had success with in regard to aggressive prostate cancer, that was the only way we got through, which was to really breakthrough in the areas of working on direct toxicities, inflammatory activity, and chronic infections and inflammatory activity. All right. Like I said, that's encapsulation of a super long discussion. It was a great question from the podcast. I want to thank whoever sent that in. And I'm Dr. A. This is our channel. Thank you all the new subscribers. Please like, share, subscribe. Do share with friends. Turn on notifications so that you know when we're doing new stuff and we're building new content constantly. Thank you again. And I'll see you on the next video.