“A man spends his first fifty years trying to make a living…the second fifty years trying to make water.”
As you watch the video the camera progresses in a fashion similar to the flow of urine: That being from the bladder, over the bladder neck, through the prostatic urethra and then out the urethra. (To grandmother’s house we go!)
You’ll note how the prostate lobes close in on the channel and all you see is lobe touching lobe. This usually begins after the age of fifty in men and is responsible for a slowing of the stream and then the things that accompany this such as frequency, urgency and getting up at night.
Medicines for this condition either relax the prostate to open this blockage (Flomax) or shrink the prostate to enlarge the channel (Proscar). If this is unsuccessful, i.e. the gland is too big for the medicine, then surgical options are done to remove the tissue to open the channel. (GreenLight Page.)
What is the most common question we hear about surgery of the prostate?
“Doc, If you are going to cut out the prostate what happens to the urethra? Do you destroy that too?”
Yes the urethra does line the lobes of the prostate and yes it is destroyed and removed. But much like how your hand heals with a cut, the tissue grows back over it-reepithelialization.
Northeast Georgia Urological Associates 