Half of all men will suffer from prostatitis. Many will experience a pelvic pain so excruciating that sitting, sleeping, and even having sex will become impossible. Most doctors are helpless to stop it. Meet the few who know how.
Deep in a redwood forest, at the end of a quiet country lane in California’s Sonoma County, 12 men in their thirties and forties lie on mats in a carpeted room on the second floor of a seven-gabled, cedar-shingled lodge. Each is wearing headphones and eye pillows.
“Your pain is not your enemy. If you know how to listen to it, it will help you,” David Wise, a 60-year-old clinical psychologist, intones into a microphone. Wise is leading a workshop, training participants in what is called paradoxical relaxation. “The more you are afraid of your pain, the more it will hurt,” he says. “Fearing pain makes you more anxious and causes you to tighten up, which raises the level of electrical activity in your muscles and makes the pain worse, which causes more tightening, more anxiety, and more pain.”
But the pain he describes is one from which any man would cower. This isn’t a gathering of weekend athletes with strained hamstrings or high-powered execs with cluster headaches. These men suffer from prostatitis, a motley array of sexual, urinary, and pelvic-floor pains and dysfunctions that make daily life agony and orgasms feel like electric shock. Each has paid $3,800 for this six-day treatment, called the Stanford Protocol. Most would have paid twice that. “I was walking down the street one day when suddenly, out of nowhere, I got this ferocious pain in the tip of my penis, as if a ferret had clamped down and wouldn’t let go,” says a 47-year-old lawyer from Portland, Oregon. A 35-year-old actuary from Sacramento, California, wound up in the fetal position in the emergency room with testicular pain that felt “like I’d been kicked in the nuts.”
Little known and poorly understood, prostatitis is men’s big secret, the third most common reason we go to urologists, number one for men under 50. Because the disease is only now being seriously studied, there are no solid numbers on how many men suffer nationwide. One recent study showed that 11 percent of the men in one county in Minnesota had been diagnosed with prostatitis in recent years. A Canadian study found that 6 percent of men in two Canadian provinces had reported moderate to severe pain from prostatitis in the prior week. Four percent of Finns have it. “Half of all men will have a prostatitis experience sometime in their lives,” says Rodney Anderson, M.D., codeveloper, with Wise, of the Stanford Protocol. Not all will become as sick as the men in the lodge, whose bizarre pains take severe tolls on relationships, careers, and lives.
It is a phenomenon I’ve come to know all too well.
When prostatitis hits, it instantly becomes the most important thing in your life. On Tuesday, I ran five miles. On Wednesday, a stabbing pain in my butt kept me from sitting down. And no one seemed to know how to help me.
As I would come to learn, my nightmare was all too typical. I was told an inadequately treated urinary tract infection had spread to my prostate. The stabbing pain was mercifully intermittent, but the intense bladder pressure was constant.
Think of a time when you really, really had to go, maybe after six beers. Imagine feeling that way all the time. Imagine trying to fall asleep. The boor who was my first urologist said, “Look at you! You need a psychiatrist!” as I sat in his office distraught after three sleepless nights. He insisted on strict celibacy during weeks-long courses of antibiotics, but his office dispensed a flyer on the illness recommending frequent sex. Rightly perceiving me on the verge of collapse, my G.P. slapped me on Xanax, a cousin of Valium in the benzodiazepine family, which seemed to quiet the nerves that were firing abnormally in a way painkillers couldn’t touch. It allowed me a few hours of sleep.
