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Non-Prescription products.
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Strictly speaking any product from corn plasters to a bottle of whisky can be prescribed, so items listed below are those you would generally buy from your health food shop or pharmacy without a doctors prescription. The shelves of every health-food shop groan under the weight of countless prostate treatments. The press and direct mail will bring further similar products to your attention. Just what does a man with a prostate condition do when faced with such choice ? Initially he will have been to his medic and had a diagnosis. Now faced with a long wait for an operation, or put on watchful waiting, he decides to try to alleviate his current symptoms. We suggest a 3 months rolling test program. Select a product and use it for 3 full months, then move on to another and so on, making notes on the results, are night time visits less ? is the flow better ? It is no good being in a hurry, the condition has probably been building up for 10 years or more so there is no way that any product can reverse it in 30 days. In fact be suspicious of any product which claims to reverse your condition 'overnight'. At the end of a year you may find that brand 'X' helps the flow and 'Y' the night time visits, so maybe you need to take both. On the other hand you may find that none help at all and you need to visit your GP again and go for Alpha-blockers or Proscar. I would remind you that if you are over 60 (in the UK) alpha-blockers and Proscar will cost you nothing. A rolling test program can make a hole in a modest budget, so you need to balance the cost saving against the side effects of the prescription products mention above.. It is pretty certain that if you check with the contents of the majority of the products on offer most will contain saw palmetto. The problem is that there appears to be no overall standard by which you can compare one brand with another. Broad guidelines however are to stick with products labelled saw palmetto extract. This is the extracted oil from the berries, as opposed to the the ground-up berry possibly after the oil has been extracted which makes for a weak potency. Heavily promoted packs in magazines etc. are not necessarily better, they may contain a low potency saw palmetto and therefore are cheap to manufacture, but they have very big advertising budget. Similarly very low costed packs may not have enough saw palmetto in them to make any difference to your prostate. Clinical work has been done on beta-sitosterol, one of the constituents of saw palmetto. A Lancet report indicated that it had a positive effect on prostate tissue. That and long term herbalist use, plus the use of the equivalent homeopathic titrations, means you can be certain that saw palmetto is not a 'snake oil mans' product. Adverse effects appear to be almost nil, with only occasional advice re constipation. You will find that most of the packs available are combination products in that they contain other herbs or vitamins which the manufacturer feels could enhance the basic saw palmetto, a shot gun approach if you like. As time allows we will attempt to cover the current products available. Other constituents used are cornsilk, karva, willow herb and GAG(Glycine, Alanine, Glutamic). The PHA have a made a comparison of saw palmetto products, the results are in issue 1/98. |
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