What did persons use for BPH (benign prostatic hyperplasia) before Flomax (antagonist of alpha1A adrenoceptors in the prostate)?
I remember hearing of prostate problems when I was a kid about the end of WWII or so. What was the treatment back then?
Prostatectomy?
At the end of WWII and earlier surgery was quite serious. Perhaps some did have prostatectomy but wouldn’t that have been rare and dangerous?
What did they do in 1300 or 1700 or even 1900 perhaps?
Saw palmetto is sometimes efficacious in relieving symptoms of an enlarged prostrate. Surgery offered a sure cure, though with the typical risks of surgery.
Saw palmetto’s benefits, if any, were not known then. In any event, as you noted, it doesn’t work for everybody. I relied on it and was unable to urinate at all for a while, after Achilles’ tendon surgery. I went to my tp who said that in “the old days” I’d be dead.
I don’t know how far back people have been using saw palmetto . . . but I take it, and it works.
Uh . . . you seem to have an atypical anatomy. 
I honestly believe it largely consisted of the doctor telling the patient, “Well, you’re getting older, you’re going to have to expect some stuff like this.”
An anesthesiologoist told me afterwards, that this is common after some surgeries due to the pain drugs you are given with the anesthesia. The real problem was that I was discharged from the hospital, unable to urinate, and when I complained about this to the nurse, she said it was just sensitive. The problem was not adequately addressed and I should not have been discharged in that condition.
Hell, I was told that very thing last Tuesday.
When my father had prostrate problems back in the 1950s, his doctor told him that every man would have prostate cancer if the just lived long enough. The surgeon’s cure for my father was to remove the whole damn thing. He lived to be 93 and had to give up sex in his mid-40s. I suspect that surgery was the method of choice for quite a while.
BTW, men who have had their prostates removed do not have to stop having sex.
And also BTW, if you have an enlarged “prostRate,” it probably means that you take up too much space when you’re lying down.
The ones whose cancer requires a bilateral nerve resection will find it difficult with a limp dick, however.
Does that mean there’s no longer any feeling in the penis? Because if there’s feeling, you don’t need an erection . . . unless, of course, you’re a missionary.
Having a prostate removed doesn’t necessarily mean you will have no feeling in the penis nor be unable to have an erection – I know first hand. It can cause that but it doesn’t automatically mean that. It does mean you will produce little to no seminal fluid.
Finasteride (aka, Propecia. Yes, the stuff that grows hair.) It’s supposed to help reduce prostate size and has the possibility of hair growth as a side effect.
I’ll let you know if it works in another four months or so.
Picky, picky, picky; I made a spelling error. It is only one of several thousand I make over the course of time; I doubt it threw confusion into the minds of the huddled masses.
MY father, later in life, told me his sex life was finished when his prostate gland was removed. I believed him. Whatever his other shortcomings, he wasn’t a liar. YMMV
Or unless you happen to be repressed devout evangelical Southern Baptists who came of age during the 1920s.
And, for the modern old goat, there is this:
Well, no. Recently, laser surgery is used, which was the situation in my case. My urologist calls it “the green light.”
I think I might have been the subject of a trial run; that particular urologist now uses laser; i really wish he had used it back then.