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| disease is irreversible and incurable and that the only appropriate treatments are symptom-suppressing drugs and surgery. |
| Then Nathan Pritikin cured his own heart disease with a low-fat diet, and his health centers trained thousands of people to do the same. Still, physicians were skeptical. It wasn't until Dean Ornish conducted a clinical trial at the University of California that the medical establishment realized that heart disease can be not only stopped but reversed and cured by changes in diet and lifestyle. |
| Then there's the prostate industry. |
| At birth, a boy's prostate gland is the size of a grain of wheat. It grows through adolescence until reaching the size of a chestnut, at which point growth stops. However, in middle age, the prostate again expands. Although medical researchers assume the renewed growth has something to do with hormone production, no one has been able to explain how or why it happens. |
| The result, called benign prostatic hypertrophy, or BPH, causes symptoms that range from mildly irritating to life-threatening. Typically, a man begins to notice that he's spending more time in the bathroom. The need to urinate may be strong and urgent, especially at night, but the resulting stream is scanty and the effort painful. This is because the swollen prostate exerts pressure that produces a feeling of fullness and interferes with urine flow. |
| Enter Proscar, the most popular drug treatment for enlarged prostates. Proscar (finasteride) must be taken for three to six months before symptoms improve, and they do so in only a small minority of patients. In fact, in August 1996, The New England Journal of Medicine announced that when tested on over 1,200 men at 31 Veterans Administration medical centers, Proscar gave "no greater relief than the placebo." Proscar does shrink the prostate gland, but as Dr. Herbert Lepor, chairman of urology at New York University Medical Center, explained, |
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