Recently, I encountered, and indeed I actually caused, a complication of robot-assisted radical prostatectomy (RARP) which was new to me, and one which I felt that I should share with other surgeons. PM, a 60-year old teacher, underwent a completely routine RARP, which took less than 2 hours to perform on a Saturday morning. During […]
Changing paradigms in the investigation of an elevated PSA level Roger Kirby, Uday Patel, Ben Challacombe and Prokar Dasgupta The Prostate Centre, London, UK Published as a comment article in BJU International 2013; 112: 283–285. doi: 10.1111/j.1464-410X.2012.11779.x. Video Commentary by Roger Kirby, BJUI Associate Editor.
In an outstanding editorial in the current issue of the Journal of Urology (https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.juro.2013.05.031) my friend and colleague Jay Smith (who has accompanied us when we climbed Mt Kinabalu in Borneo and on cycle challenges in Malawi and Madagascar to raise funds for The Urology Foundation) asks the important question as to who decides when […]
“You never have a second chance to make a first impression.” How you initially come across to your colleagues, the nurses and your patients as a newly appointed consultant can set the tone for your consultancy for the rest of your career. Once an opinion (winner or loser) has been formed about you, it is […]
There was a time when doctors were reluctant to tell patients the truth about a diagnosis of cancer, and even more unwilling to discuss any illness from which they themselves suffered. John Anderson broke the mould last year when he made a public announcement about his newly diagnosed liver metastases, which subsequently turned out to […]
I have the fondest memories of Bill Hendry, who sadly died, aged 73, last autumn. I first met him, and his wife Chirsty, on a urology section of the Royal Society of Medicine (RSM) ski trip, when I immediately fell for his infectious enthusiasm and energy. I remember hearing him delivering a brilliant lecture on […]
It was weird, having spent a career looking after men with prostate problems, to discover that my own PSA was raised to 4.3ng/mL. A 3 Tesla MRI with gadolinium enhancement revealed a lesion in the right peripheral zone, which a biopsy confirmed as a Gleason 3+4=7 adenocarcinoma. The decision wasn’t difficult for me: I opted […]
You wouldn’t expect the pilot of the aeroplane in which you fly to the EAU or AUA meeting to be a novice who was training on the aeroplane that you were being transported in! Similarly, patients undergoing robot-assisted surgery do not expect to be the “guinea pigs” upon which trainee surgeons move up the learning curve of […]
The Patagonia trans-Andes Challenge was the fourth in the series of cycle rides that have taken us to Sicily, Malawi and Madagascar to raise funds for The Urology Foundation (TUF) a charity that supports research and training into all urological diseases. It brings 14 urologists, including the indefatigable Roland Morley, Neil Barber and Richard Hindley, […]
The idea of a joint fund-raising trek in support of Prostate Cancer UK (formerly Prostate Action) and Well-Being of Women (WoW) dates back to 2005, when almost 100 trekkers joined us to walk across the desert to Petra in Jordan to raise more than £600,000 for these two noble causes. Neither Marcus Setchell nor I […]