Ty,

Here are a few more thoughts on hormone therapy.

In your original posting (July 31) you said you might get
surgery in two weeks or radiation in 10 days.  As another
poster pointed out, HT is rarely done before surgery.  It
is often done before radiation, but 10 days (or 8 now) is
probably not enough time for the hormones to do their
work before the radiation begins.  Usually they begin
radiation about two months after the start of HT.

One reason I've read for this is that the HT shrinks the
prostate - making a smaller and easier target for
radiation.  But it takes time to do that.

HT is not without side effects.  Some doctors don't
like it.  Some don't think it helps.  Some swear by it.
I spent many hours researching it on Pubmed, looking
at the outcomes of clinical trials and retrospective studies
of men who had, or didn't have, HT before radiation.
I finally decided to get it after reading a study that claimed
that 5 years after radiation, the psa success rate was
63% for men with Gleason 7 but no HT, and 88% for those
with G7 who had HT.  But I'll never know whether it
was the right choice or not, and I couldn't find any other
studies that corroborated that one.

As for combined androgen blockade, again, there seem
to be some doctors who think it's great and others who
think it's no better than a single HT therapy.  There is
a book by Stephen Strum, a medical oncologist, that
endorses it in some cases.  His book is available from:

  http://www.lefprostate.org/bios.html

When I got into all this I imagined I'd read the literature
weigh the evidence, and make the scientifically best
choice.  But it turns out that the literature just doesn't
tell you what the best choice is.  There are too many
conflicting theories and conflicting studies.  As with so
much of contemporary medicine, we're still a long way
from knowing everything we need to know.

Good luck.

   Alan