Squeezed and Shrunk

Here's the story of a guy with chronic prostatitis causing constant pain in his genital regions. Read along to get the facts and see what you might do to help yourself or a friend in a similar situation.

Case #: 1165

Concern：

I have Prostatitis that causes pain in my perineum and scrotum. The my corpus cavernous of my penis feels as if it has a tear in it. And because of this issue, I have experienced pain, penis shrinkage and urinary problems. What’s wrong with me?

Discussion：

The prostate, found only in males, is a spongy little gland, normally the size of a large walnut. The prostate sits below your bladder and wraps around your urethra. The prostate, together with the urethra and seminal vesicles exude semen. When the body functions properly, the prostate generates clear or milky prostatic fluid that amounts to at least half the volume of your ejaculation.

So What's Wrong?

Your prostate never stops growing throughout your lifespan. In the case of a hypothetical, textbook-perfect-healthy male, the prostate remains at a manageable size for a lifetime. For the rest of us, the prostate usually responds to any problems (such as injury or infections) by swelling, and it is often quite difficult to get it to shrink back to normal size. Reviewing details about the prostate's location within your body, it should be easy to see how an inflamed prostate would interfere with urination.

The simplest problem comes from narrowing the passageway through which urine exits the body. If it takes forever for you to empty your bladder over the course of a long and weak stream, a swollen prostate may be the culprit. In addition, the inflammation may cause a malfunction in the complex biological ducts in the walls of the urethra: they open when you ejaculate and close when you're finished, but inflammation may reduce the effectiveness of the seal. If any amount of urine gets into the sensitive tissues of the prostate, the inflammation and pain may become sharply increased, as you've noted.

Prostatitis can be caused by bacterial infections, but such things are relatively rare, striking no more than 1 in ten prostatitis sufferers and often 1 in 20 or fewer. The rest of the time, the cause is still being debated among prominent figures in Western medicine, but an overstressed neural network and imbalanced hormone levels resulting from excessive sexual activities has been suggested. One hormone in particular, prostaglandin E-2, contributes when you have too much of it and your liver is too exhausted from all the sex or masturbation to filter the extra out.

What Can I Do?

Your health-care provider will, in all likelihood, recommend a Prostate-specific Antigen (PSA) test, which measures the levels of a particular enzyme in your ejaculate. (One hint: avoid ejaculating for up to 48 hours before your test, preferably at least 24 hours beforehand.) It's not the only test available, and you should be prepared to take a few others.

You may also be advised to massage your prostate; the PSA test may have introduced you to the experience, which will also give your health-care provider an opportunity to help you learn how and how often to do it yourself. Assuming that you are still sexually active or masturbating, you should cut back on all such activities as much as possible for about two or three weeks, as the process and after-effects can and do keep your prostate swollen.

While pursuing these and other possible options, you may consider using an herbal supplement designed specifically to assist your body re-adjust the hormonal balance that may be perpetuating the discomfort by boosting the recovery-rates of the the glands and organs that have lost some capacity to perform that function. (TRY: Herbal Solution for Prostate Health Relief) The most important thing you can do is to pay attention to it. Prostatitis will not go away if you ignore it, and can easily become something far worse, even deadly. Study it carefully to drag it out of the darkness of ignorance, and you may find that it becomes a lot more easily-managed than you had thought.