PC not curable

I'm cured until the doctor tells me otherwise

Miki,

Your husband is as close to a cure as you can get with PCa. Walsh uses the word cure and I believe he has been at this longer then the guy on your FB page. Since there is not test that can be done to tell us that one cancer cell was left behind it is impossible to tell anyone they are cured of cancer. If you husband has BCR his chance of being "cured" again is highly highly likely. His BCR will most likely be local. This is when a positive margin is a good thing. You know "probably" where the cancer is. For someone to say that 9 years later the cancer sat dormant and then returned is impossible to tell. We don't know if the cancer was not removed the first time or if benign tissue that was left behind turned cancerous years later.

Walsh claims that in 30 years he has not lost an organ confined G6 patient. So that is as close to a cure we G6 people can get, I'll take it. Infact, in a study from Johns Hopkins 13 guys out of 2,400 had BCR during a 15 year study. All who had salvage SRT retuned to 0 PSA. So it is theorized that G6 stays local if it is not completely removed during surgery and salvage SRT cures them after.

I think the FB guy sounds a little angry. I am sure he is mad about having PCa like I was when first diagnosed. But, he is correct, there is no definitive cure for any cancer out there. Just statistics. Be happy you are in the statistics that say your husband will very very very likely die from something else one day. So much that heart disease and other cancers will get him first before PCa will. But those are stats. to....

In the literal sense, the OP is right. No cancer is truly curable by medicine. I wonder if he knows how many viral infections are curable by medicine? The answer to that one, my friends, is also zero.

That being said, I'll take non-detectable for a number of years. Truly curing cancer--any cancer--is, I'm afraid, far from us. To cure cancer, we need to get deeper into the gene than we've gone so far, and perhaps learn that developing cancer is hard-wired into our own genetic material, so eventually all cancer treatment will be individualized, for our own individual genetic flaws.

I used the word curable to my pc for 20 years , until 2011 when my PSA started to rise .
I will say to you what my doctor said to me" consider yourself cured but keep having a PSA
test every year " I am not trying to rain on anyone parade . As for myself , I will say from this day on
that my PC is in remission . Just completed 38 session of SRT and will have my first PSA test this coming
Monday . Hopefully the SRT will put it back in remission for another 10-20 years.

During the 20 years all my psa reading was 0.000 .

Cure is just a word. And all words are subject to definition and to varying interpretations. Sorry, I was once an editor.

As for the meaning of cure, I'm much more comfortable thinking in the language of statistics. If I was told that based on what is known of my pathology, it could be said with 95% confidence that the probability of a recurrence in (for example) 10 years was very small -- say 1 or 2 percent, I'd take that as being a more realistic assessment than "cure" but also just about as good in terms of reassurance that I'd live to die of something else.

Doug ,
some one told me it was a 5 , my surgery was done by the military at Hickman Army Medical Center HI .
don't know if you every been in the military , anyone who have will tell you that they do things a little different
than civilians lol.

Dr Allen Morey done my surgery when he was a Capt in the army. I will post my psa result as soon as I
receive the result.

Shaba.Doug,
Wandering off topic here, but greetings from the US Navy. I and some of my squadron mates got ripped one night with a bunch of Canadian naval air guys in Bermuda in the early 70s while my American patrol squadron (VP-8) was there on mid-Atlantic anti-submarine patrol.

If you define curable as "after treatment if never comes back" (which was your definition) then the vast majority are cured. If you define cure as "eventually dies of something else" you're up to 91.5%. And the numbers for low- and intermediate-risk cases are even better than that.

Sorry, I just can't buy into the FB posters rant...