In 2008 I was diagnosed with Prostate Cancer. As I educated myself about the disease and later underwent treatments, I decided to share what I learned with the 250,000 men who receive this diagnosis every year — all from a patient’s perspective.

I segmented the documentary into eight episodes of seven or eight minutes each, so total length is just under 60 minutes. The link below will take you to the play list, which will play them in order. They look better in HD.

If you want to watch them over a period of a couple days, just come back to my blog (getjoenolan.com) and after starting the video hit the “YouTube” button at the bottom of the video. This takes you to my channel where you can pick whichever episode you want to watch (and read older posts if you want).

Please share the series with anyone you think might be interested in this subject. If you have a moment and want to comment, feel free.

Everything Reminds me of Something Else

An important part of this documentary is the report that was put out by the U.S. Preventative Services Task Force. This report questioned the necessity for screening for prostate cancer and flew in the face of what was then the conventional wisdom.

This seems to be happening a lot lately. The most recent example of this was the report that Teeth Flossing might be unnecessary. The news broke when the latest dietary guidelines for Americans dropped prior recommendations for flossing. Somebody realized that they’d never fully researched it’s effectiveness.

The American Academy of Periodontology acknowledged that most current evidence doesn’t prove much because researchers had not been able to include enough participants or “examine gum health over a significant amount of time.”

Say what? I have never had a dentist that didn’t tell me with 100% sincere confidence that flossing my teeth was going to save me a lot of trouble in the future and only a fool wouldn’t do it. I’ve even read that if you floss you will live longer — a lot longer, like six years!

I do it at least once a day, often twice and on my biannual visits receive compliments on my routine. You can be pretty sure your dentist is still going to encourage it, but it surprised the hell out of me that nobody ever fully checked this out.

Remember how eating eggs was going to kill you because they had a lot of cholesterol in them? Well, the latest information is that it isn’t clear to what extent the cholesterol that you eat raises cholesterol in your blood. For years researchers have attempted to link the two but with very little success.

And then there’s drinking. True, drinking too much will do damage, but recent research shows that lifelong moderate drinking can ward off cognitive decline and improve brain function. This was reported in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease where in a study of 489 women, moderate drinkers scored higher than the abstinent or heavy drinking ones on cognitive function tests. One thing that hasn’t changed though is how hard it is to know what “moderate” is.

Joe