What Causes Prostatitis?

Posting Date: 06/26/2000

Jody: My fiancé went to the emergency room with severe abdominal pain. We thought it was a kidney stone or appendicitis, but the doctor gave him a rectal exam and it turned out to be a prostate infection.

I didn't get a chance to talk to the doctor and I want to know what caused the infection and if my boyfriend will now be prone to them.

Dr. Dean: Pain coming from the prostate can fool people because it can be very difficult to localize. We are often fooled into thinking it's something else.

We are always striving for the balance between taking seriously any sudden onset of abdominal pain, and doing a full work up on every person with indigestion who walks into an emergency room.

Your boyfriend has what's called prostatitis, and the cause is often unknown. One possibility is the same type of organism that causes bladder infections. Or prostatitis can be a sexually transmitted infection, caused by chlamydia, for example. Bacteria can create an acute or a chronic infection.

If bacteria are the cause, antibiotics usually take care of it. Also, doctors sometimes massage the prostate to drain it.

When I was in medical school we had a debate about whether or not to tell men that a lot of orgasms are helpful. I've never prescribed an orgasm in my life, but some doctors think it is a good treatment for prostatitis because it empties the infected contents. Expressing the infected matter is a common procedure in treating diseased glands in the body's other organs.

Most of the time, prostatitis is treatable, but I've got to warn you that there is also a non-bacterial chronic prostatitis that is nasty and tricky to get rid of. We don't yet understand much about it. It may be viral, but the evidence is not convincing. It is perhaps a weird organism that's not responding to antibiotics.

Now that you are out of the busy emergency room setting, you should try to get more information from your partner's doctor, because he or she is the one who, unlike me, knows the details of his case.

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