Sixteen years ago my problem was that there was nothing to read. A friend told me in an airport that I had a prostate issue. I had no idea. I went looking and found medical journals and almost nothing else. So I looked into it, made some small changes, got my PSA checked, and that was about it for years. There was nothing more to go on. That experience shaped how I think about all of this. And I have realised this week that it also misled me. Because I built Prostate Paladin on the idea that the missing thing is information. Find the clear answer, hand it over, job done. That was true for me in 2010. Then I read about a man called Johnathan Tuiasosopo in Washington State. Samoan, fit, 57 when he was diagnosed. Father died of cancer. More than one brother or sister died of cancer. Never had a screening. He had every piece of information I did not have. It did not move him. What moved him afterwards is the part that stuck with me. He started talking, at his church, on his rugby team, wherever it came up. And when he is talking to people who are wary of doctors, he sometimes calls them healers instead. One word swapped out, because that word gets a man through a door. Thirty years in geology taught me the data is only half the job. The other half is whether anybody acts on it. I had somehow forgotten that about my own subject. If you already know the family history, do the thing I would do. Write down the age your father or your brother was when their cancer was found. Then write down the date of your last PSA reading. One of those two numbers is usually missing, and that is the one to go and get. Then I want to ask you something, and I am genuinely curious rather than making a point. When somebody in your family finally did go and get checked, what actually tipped it? Was it a fact, or was it a person? https://www.skool.com/prostate-paladin-4886/about

Please extend a warm welcome to our newest members. Timothy Bright, @Timothy Bright , Lynne Vella, @Lynne Vella , Rodrigo Rios, @Rodrigo Rios , and Auli Takala, @Auli Takala I am very happy you have decided to join our community. Here we aim to spread awareness about the prostate as much as possible. Please introduce yourselves and share your story if you are comfortable doing so, or comment on an existing post that resonates with you, all are welcome. Thank you for being here and helping to spread prostate awareness. Please check out the classroom and Start Here to begin your prostate journey. Alex

I want to put something to you that I had not thought about properly until this week, and I suspect some of you know far more about it than I do. Howard Wolinsky is a medical journalist in Chicago. In 2010 he was found to have the lowest grade of prostate cancer there is, the kind doctors watch rather than cut out. His urologist said he would die with it and not from it. So he went on monitoring, and he has kept every appointment since. When he went to renew his life insurance, eight companies turned him down for having untreated cancer. He had done exactly what he was told. Somewhere between the consulting room and the underwriting desk, watching and waiting became untreated. I will be honest, my first reaction was annoyance, and then I remembered I have a smaller version of the same story. I was taking blood pressure tablets when I changed insurance companies, and the new one would not cover anything to do with the circulatory system, because of the high blood pressure pills. The circulatory system covers most things. I signed it anyway, because what else do you do. Two things I want to be careful about. The first is that this is not an argument for treatment. Wolinsky says plainly that he does not know whether surgery would have made the insurance any easier, and he is the one who lived it. Nobody should be reaching for an operation to satisfy a form. The second is that his was an American policy and two brokers told him they cannot predict that every man being monitored will be refused. So this is a question to ask, not a fact to be frightened of. Maybe a question that needs to be posed to the insurance companies to see what their reaction is. The question is the useful bit. Ring whoever holds his current life insurance and ask whether the policy treats monitored prostate cancer as untreated cancer. Write down the answer, the date, and the name of the person who said it. Now here is what I actually want from you, and please answer it straight. Has anyone here hit a wall like this? Insurance, a mortgage, travel cover, a medical on a job, anything at all where the diagnosis caused a problem that had nothing to do with your health. I would rather build a proper list of what to watch out for from people who have been through it than guess at it myself.

This is a recurring theme, where men need to be reassured that a Prostate Cancer test is just a blood draw. A cancer centre in Amarillo, Texas is running a free prostate screening on 15 October. The director of the centre is quoted three times in the local paper and he does not mention cancer once. Two of the three are about what the test is not. "This is not what you think it is. This is not the finger. This is not, having an invasive test. It's a very simple blood draw." The third is that the form asking where to send the results takes longer to fill in than the blood draw does. A cancer centre decided the first obstacle in front of them was not fear of the disease. It was a wrong picture. So, my question for the room. When you first agreed to have your prostate checked, what did you think was about to happen? And was it what actually happened? For the partners here, same question about your man. What did he think he was agreeing to? I would like to know whether that centre in Texas has got it right. https://www.skool.com/prostate-paladin-4886/about