A joint meeting of Man to Man (M2M) and Side by Side
(SXS), the prostate cancer (PCa) support and educa-tion
groups sponsored by the American Cancer
Society was held November 6, 2003 in the Central
Hudson Electric Company Auditorium-, Rt. 9,
Poughkeepsie, NY. There were 65 in attendance
including 2 new M2M members and 9 SXS. Several of
the new members were given our NEWBIE BOOK.

PLEASE NOTE Poughkeepsie M2M has back
issues of our newsletters & information on PCa.

go to

www. geocities. com/ charl1ep/ Cancer/
or http:// www. boodrow. com

PROGRAM

MAN TO MAN NOV. 6, 2003 MEETING 
Guest Speakers
Dr. S. Kahn & Dr. C. Moorthy

For November we were treated to two lectures.
Dr. Scott Kahn a local Urologist. His practice is
with Dutchess Urology Associates. His subject
tonight was radical prostatectomy (RP). He is very
confident that his patients who undergo RP will
have excellent results.

Dr. Chitti Moorthy spoke second. He is director of
Radiation Medicine at WestchesterMedical
Center, Director of Shaped Beam Radiosurgery
and Professor of Clinical Radiation Medicine at
New York Medical College.

Dr. Kahn started with an anatomy lesson showing
where the prostate is relative to the bladder and
rectum. Also shown were the neuro-vascular bundle
on each side. This was done to show the surgeon's
operating field taking into account the
extent of the prostate and the nerve bundle and
the intricacy of working in this area. He showed
several excellent slides of the operation in
progress. One of the slides was striking in that
it showed the preservation of a urethral stump to

During the RP procedure, Dr. Kahn has learned
to spare important muscle fibers and certain
nerves so that the two I s (incontinence and
impotency or (ED) erectile dysfunction) are prevented.

He stated that he considers prostate cancer cur-able.
He also said that newly diagnosed PCa
patients do not need to travel out of the area for
expert treatment, the talent and equipment is
right here in the Hudson Valley region.

He explained how there are two sphincter muscles
that control urinary function, the internal and
external sphincter muscles. The bladder neck is
the external sphincter.

He then showed the results of his 46 prostatectomies
which pointed out the high degree of success
in these cases where the side effects of
incontinence and impotence were minimized.
Incontinence was kept to less than 10%.
Impotency was dependent on nerve sparing, the
man's age and whether he had erectile dysfunction
before the operation. If the nerves were
intact and the man had excellent health, potency
could range around 70%. If complicating factors
were involved, potency dropped off rapidly.

Relapse fell into three groups. If the cancer was
contained in the capsule the rate was less than
10%. If the cancer reached the capsule the rate
was 30%. If the cancer penetrated the capsule
the rate 50%.

He has been in practice for over 10 years and
has completed a total of 250 RP's. His data was
on the 46 patients who underwent RP in our local
area during the past 3 years. The average age
was 60 years old. Their ages ranged from 45-70,
nine were African American men and 37 were
White men. The dates were from 6/ 00 to 11/ 03.

AGE                       PSA

40-49 yrs. old.        0.0-2.5ng/ ml
50-59                     0.0-3-5
60-69                     0.0-4.5
70-79                     0.0-6.5

Patients diagnosed with low PSA will do the best
with RP. He does not order diagnostic tests such
as bone scan, or CT Scan when patients have
PSA <10 and GS 3+ 3-or 3+ 4. He feels these
tests are not important with those numbers.

He said a "properly selected patient" that is one
who has at least a 10 year life expectancy, a PSA
< 10-GS <7 and in good health, do very well with
the RP procedure. The procedure takes 2.5
hours, estimated blood loss-750-cc's. hospital
stay 3 days. He has all his RP patients donate
their own blood. He feels blood filtering also
known as cell saver transfusion should not be
used with cancer patients. He stated, that there
is a possibility that cancer cells will not be filtered
during the cell saver transfusion and can be put
back into the patient and lay dormant for many
years and then possibly show up as a tumor in
the kidney, liver or someplace else in the body.

He has asked all his patients if they would
choose RP again as their initial treatment for
PCa and 91% said yes.

Dr. Moorthy

Dr. Moorthy talked about the different methods of
radiation. He first started with Seed Implant . He
has been involved with this for more than 27
years. The early work with BRT (brachytherapy)
was at MSKCC.

He stated the T1 and T2 stages of PCa are best
suited for seed implantation. He showed many
slides demonstrating the technique and showing
the pre-planning that goes into the operation to
place the seeds exactly. He explained his use of
Iodine instead of Palladium even though he was
one of the first pioneers in the use of Palladium.

He explained open beam therapy, where the
exposure of benign tissue can be destroyed and
leads to problems such as rectal bleeding or
fecall incontinence. There is no method to concentrate
the beam into a sharp focus and of
course the depth of penetration is mostly uncontrollable.

To remedy this the next method developed was
the use of 3D Conformal Beam Radiation. Here ,
the prostate is thoroughly mapped and with the
aid of computers multiple beams shot at many
angles to engulf the prostate allows less damage
to surrounding tissue. Each beam is a fraction of
the full power but when added up gives the full
power required because of focusing. Using a
template also restricts peripheral damage. 3 D
images of the prostate has improved seed placement
tremendously.

He described IMRT (Intensity Modulated
Radiation Therapy). Here we have the best of
the schemes. The radiation can not only be
shaped accurately but each of the mini beams
can be modulated to limit the depth of penetration
to any desired distance. This allows a very
good margin of safety in avoiding Radiation of
the Bladder, the Rectum and the Urethra. He
showed the computer calculated areas of radiation
and where the cool spots were. This technique
can be used in conjunction with Seed
Implant when the patient's Gleason Score and
Grade level imply that more aggressive therapy
is needed.

He stated the early PCa diagnosed patients have
plenty of time to make up their minds as to which
treatment protocol they want to undergo. Certain
treatment protocols should be followed. For
instance for BRT a PSA of <10 and GS <6.

Jim Kiseda M2M Poughkeepsie

__________________________________

Newcomers & PCa. 101

1) He is 75 years old. He was diagnosed last
May. His PSA was 6.5, with a GS of 6. He
underwent Seed Implantation (Brachytherapy)
several months ago, administered by our guest
speaker Dr. C. Moorthy.

2) He is 73 years old. He had a PSA of 1.6 last
year. His present PSA is 2.1. He has not been
diagnosed, but is here to gather information.

___________________________

If Fish Could Vote
Part two

Wild salmon processors are struggling, retreating
from some Alaska harvest grounds amid an
onslaught of farmed fish that has swamped the
salmon market and collapsed prices. In just the
past year, global farmed-salmon production
increased 18% to reach 2.5 billion pounds compared
to 1.65 billion pounds of wild salmon haul.
Explosive growth of the salmon-farming industry
has seen small operators cede to large corporate
farms.

There has been criticism of the farms such as
widely publicized research in Britain that trace
amounts of chemical contaminates were found in
the fish. "The industry treats criticism as a public
relations challenge rather than a reason to make
substantive changes in the ways they are doing
business," says a former member of Canada's
House of Commons. Some advances have been
made, such as effective new vaccines to prevent
disease outbreak, decreasing the use of antibiotics.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA),
which makes recommendations about safe mercury
levels in sport fish, allows up to 8oz. of any
fish per week with the same population. While
these restrictions though contradictory are steps
in the right direction, they appear to be highly
conservative. The nutritional advantage of fish
surely complicates the task faced by health officials
in protecting the public from methylmercury
toxicity. EPA's safe exposure estimate of
methylmercury has dropped twice in the past 16
years. Emerging evidence indicates that the safe
dose may drop even lower in the future.

Compounding the problem is the lack of effective
education and outreach to pregnant women
and the population at large about risks and the
near to absent information on the levels of mercury
and other contaminant's in fish we buy.

The FDA's methylmercury safeguards are
designed to protect the average sized woman
eating an average fish contaminated with an
average amount of mercury that decays in her
body at an average rate. The Environment
Working Group (EWG) assessed fetal exposure
to methylmercury taking into account a host of
real life differences in individual exposure, including
a mother's body weight and blood volume,
varying methylmercury absorption and distribution
rates and methylmercury decay in different
pregnant women. FDA should be leading the
way, let alone getting involved at this level of
sophistication.

EWG would expand the FDA list of fish to be
avoided during pregnancy and nursing which
includes tuna steaks, sea bass, Oysters (Gulf of
Mexico), marlin, halibut, pike, walleye, white
croaker and largemouth bass.

The FDA's recommendation that pregnant
women eat 12oz. a week of any fish (except the
4 that are not allowed) should be greatly revised
according to EWG. To protect women and kids
the following seafood should not be eaten more
than 1 meal per month: canned tuna, mahi mahi,
blue mussels, eastern oyster, cod, pollock,
salmon from the Great Lakes, blue crab from the
Gulf of Mexico, wild channel catfish and lake
whitefish.

EWG deems the following fish to be safe for
pregnant women and they urge the FDA to pro-mote
them: farmed trout, farmed catfish, shrimp,
fish sticks, summer flounder, wild pacific salmon,
croaker, mid Atlantic blue crab and haddock.
FDA lacks comprehensive data on methylmercury
in fish, much of the data being outdated.
The following additional fish are potential problems
according to available information: sea
bass, bluefish, bonito, porgy, halibut, Atlantic cod,
pacific cod, pollock, yellowtail, lake trout, black
and red grouper, red snapper, rockfish, flounder,
orange roughy, sand and white perch and dover
sole.

Consumers have a right to know about contamination
of the food supply. FDA needs to be
responsive to this right. Longer term, the solution
is to halt mercury pollution from coal-burning
power plants, the largest man-made source of
environmental mercury. Currently they are com-

Dr. Mercola offers a list of safe fish with the
caveat that all seafood are "potentially contaminated
with mercury." He would revise EWGs's list
of what is safe by excluding shell fish and fish
without scales. Here is his recommended list:
summer flounder, wild pacific salmon, croaker,
sardines, haddock and tilapia.

Ending this gloomy article on an uptick, Dr.
Mercola believes that we have viable options for
obtaining the nutritious benefits of fish (diets of
Americans are dangerously low in omega-3 fat
he says), such as an Alaskan wild red salmon
that is mercury safe and PCB free and a high quality
purified fish oil from Norway (again,
http:// www. mercola. com).

Mike Kulla, Poughkeepsie Man to Man

______________________________

Psychology of Cancer

Cancer changes our lives physically but also
emotionally. The more we understand our psychological
reaction to it the more effectively we
can cope. This is the first of a series of articles on
the psychological effects of cancer. I am a member
of Poughkeepsie Man to Man and a psychologist
for the past 47 years.

Over the last several decades there has been
significant progress in cancer treatment from a
medical perspective. Treatment has become
more sophisticated and more highly selective.
Despite these advances the causes of cancer
remains a subject of speculation and controversy.
Once we believed that the proliferation of
cancer cells originating in the body and our emotions
originating in the mind were separate entities.
Now we know that the physical and the
mental are interrelated and that one cannot be
considered independently without the other.

Historical references abound with the connected-ness
between the physical and the psychological.
In the second century AD Galen noted that
those with more "sanguine dispositions [confident
and optimistic" were less likely to get cancer
than those who were melancholy. In the eighteenth
and nineteenth century many physicians
realized that cancer tends to follow tragedy or crisis
in a person's life, especially the depressed,
but psychology was still undeveloped to be of
help. Elida Evans, a student of Carl Jung, in
1926 paved the way with her psychological study
of cancer. However the book was almost completely
ignored. Evans concluded that "cancer is
a symbol, as most illnesses of something going
wrong in a patient's life, a warning to him to take
another road."

Why did it take so long for psychology to be recognized
for its contributions in the treatment of
cancer? Lawrence LeShan in his book about
emotional factors in the causation of cancer
describes how he was turned away by one hospital
and research center after another in regard
to his proposals on questions linking cancer and
emotions. LeShan believed that while doctors
have long accepted that personality and feelings
can cause such problems as ulcers, asthma and
migraine headaches, there was strong resistance
to the ideas that there could be any psychosomatic
basis for an organic disease so
"voracious" as cancer.

Before the psychoanalytic pioneers developed
psychological methods as change agents there

Medical strides do not lessen the need for a better
understanding of the psychological factors
involved in 1) the susceptibility to cancer and 2)
for those stricken with cancer needing to face the
crisis in a constructive way.

This article will be continued in the next
newsletter.

Mike Kulla, Poughkeepsie Man to Man.

_________________________________

Joke Du Jour

A 97-year-old man goes to the doctor and com-plains
that he's losing his potency.

The doctor says "When did you first notice this
problem." The man says "last night and again
this morning."

Herm London-M2M Poughkeepsie

__________________________________

M2M & SXS Training Session

Lois Lorenz
Director Patient Support Services
American Cancer Society

As you know I am the centralized staff member
who will be working with our Man to Man/ Brother
to Brother programs. I have formed an advisory
committee made up of staff members and Man to
Man volunteers. Their charge is to establish
annual priorities for the program and conduct
regional Man to Man & SXS volunteer training

Members of the Advisory Committee are Patti
Allen, Kathy Brodsky, Seth Fritts, Mel Katz,
Calvin Martin, Dennis O'Hara, and Frank Reedy.
If you have any thoughts or ideas about the program
please feel free to discuss them with any of
us.

We would like to establish a regional training
schedule for Spring, 2004. The training should
include those men newly interested in facilitating
a Man to Man support group, men who may be
leading a group now but have not received
training, and/ or support group leaders who need
to be re-certified. We would also like to include
men who are interested in speaking with others
on a one-on-one basis. The training program is
a full-day and could be held weekdays or a
weekend day depending on the availability of the
participants. We would like to host the training in
a region that has a number of trainees and then
open the invitation to surrounding regions. Please
complete the mini-survey below and return it to
me.

Would you be interested in being trained (NY &
NJ area members) this Spring? ___________

Which would be more convenient for you:
_______ Weekday _______ Saturday ______
Sunday ________ No preference
How many men or ladies might attend the
training (give numbers for each category):
_______ New volunteer facilitators
_________ Current facilitators who have not
received training
_______ Facilitators who need re-certification
_______ One-on-one volunteers

LOIS LORENZ
Director Patient Support Services
American Cancer Society
Please be advised you can respond to this
note by contacting Dennis O'Hara
e mail <IGGY41@ AOL. COM
or Phone 845-297-7737

TO ALL RECIPIENTS OF OUR
NEWSLETTER.

Now is the time to renew your FREE subscription
to the Poughkeepsie Man to Man
newsletter. We are in the process of updating
our mailing list and we need your input.
Please take a minute to fill in the following
form and send it back as soon as possible (or
hand in at any of our meetings). Or you can
email me the info. If you have a summer and
winter address, list both and the American
Cancer Society will automatically switch your
address at the proper time so you won't miss
any issues. All we need are the months spent
at each address. What could be easier? Even
if you have just started receiving the newsletter,
please send in the form anyway.

The form is inserted in a separate page
along with a pre addressed envelope.
We have made it real easy for you to
respond to this very important

announcement. SO DO IT! NOW

TO ALL RECIPIENTS OF OUR
NEWSLETTER.

If you are experiencing any problems with receiving
the newsletter, possibly your name, address
or zip code is wrong or if you are receiving duplicate
or triplicate issues or if you know of any
other members who are experiencing
mailing problems, contact Peter & Teresa Hardin,
phone: 845-897-9667, e-mail: <hardin. pt@ verizon.
net>, or regular ground mail: Peter Hardin,
12 Penn Street, Fishkill, NY 12524

Attention: M2M Meeting cancelations
In the future we will base our decisions whether to
cancel a M2M & Side by Side meetings dependent
on what the school system's in our area do. When

________________________________

New York State Prostate Cancer Coalition
(NYSPCC)

The NYSPCC is finally off and running but at a
slow pace as of this writing. The NYSPCC was
originally spearheaded last year by Bill Winans
(passed away) of Syracuse M2M along with Chip
Lockwood former ACS director of men's health.

A committee met in NYC on Nov 12, 2003 and
appointed an interim chairman, Darryl Mitteldorf
(Male Care in NYC) and two co chairs, Calvin
Martin (Brother to Brother Harlem) and Chip
Lockwood, Syracuse NY) The three interim officer's
first job will be to set up by laws.

The NYSPCC will be represented by groups from
all areas of NY State, including M2M, USTOO,
Brother to Brother, Male Care, and others.

The other members present were, Mel Katz,
M2M, NYC, -Dennis O'Hara M2M, Poughkeepsie
NY, -Joe Burns USTOO, NY.-Dr. Anthony Scalzo
Syracuse, NY.-Winston Dwyer, NY-Frank Reedy
M2M, NJ (as a consultant)

The meeting was hosted by ACS in NYC attended
by Seth Fritts. We thank ACS for allowing us
to conduct our first official meeting at their facility.

NYSPCC Mission Statement

1) Educate state government and policy makers
regarding cancer.
2) Inform the public.
3) Provide a resource for men with PCa, their
families and caregivers.

NYSPCC Vision Statement

Provide a voice, forum and focal point for
prostate cancer in New York State in order to
enhance and improve the care and quality of
life for men with prostate cancer and to educate
the public and in particular all men in
New York State.

________________________________________

Prostate Protection
No-Snip Tumor Scans

A double-scanning technique for prostate tumors and cancer-related chemicals may one day mean fewer biopsies for men with suspected prostate cancer. That's the hope of cancer specialists who developed PROSE (prostate spectroscopy and imaging examination), a noninvasive imaging system.

PROSE combines magnetic resonance imaging (to look inside the prostate gland) with magnetic resonance spectroscopy (which measures levels of certain prostate chemicals to determine if cancer is present).

Prostate Spectroscopy and Imaging Examination

Meetings and speakers for 2003

Dec------4 a Viewing of DVDs by Dr. Snuffy
Meyers on prostate cancer diagnosis and
staging, and Dr. D. Heber on diet.

Meetings and speakers for 2004

Jan---8 Dr. E. Goldfisher, Update on PCa
trials. Levitra and Provenge
Feb---5 To Be Announced( TBA)
March---4 (TBA)
April---1 (TBA) Change of meeting place
May---6 (TBA)
June---3 (TBA)
July---8 (TBA)
August--5 (TBA)
September---2 (TBA)
October----7 (TBA)
Nov,---4 (TBA)
Dec---2 (TBA)

____________________________________

Volunteer drivers are always 
needed by the American Cancer 
Society to transport patients for treatment.
This is a good cause. As little
as an hour a week will make a huge
difference in someone's life. Contact
Byllye at our local ACS office at
452-2932 press #3 and then #10
mention M2M. Side by Sider's are
welcome to volunteer.

_________________________________

Attention:

We always meet the first THURSDAY OF THE MONTH UNLESS 
OTHERWISE SPECIFIED
Next meeting Thurs,
Dec. 4, 2003 at 6pm held at
Central Hudson Auditorium Rt 9 in
Poughkeepsie--
SXS Joins us For Directions 
Call 452-2932 press 3 
and then 10 to reach local receptionist