Postgrad course in Male Pelvic Pain for MDs

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New Course on Male Pelvic Pain

The International Pelvic Pain Society is offering a new postgraduate course on male pelvic pain at their 10th Annual Scientific Meeting (Aug 2003). Jerome Weiss, President, recently said "It is important to recognize that males lag far behind when it comes to diagnosing and treating pelvic pain... men are given only one diagnosis - prostatitis, whether or not it can be substantiated." The course will cover how "underlying myofascial and nerve dysfunction can create scrotal and perineal pain in men and vulvar pain in women, and/or urinary urgency and frequency in both." Therapies will also be discussed. Please let your medical care providers know about this unique opportunity. This is open to medical care providers only and is a CME opportunity.


Younger Men with IC

With the perception of IC as a disease of women, men often feel confused and alone. More and more researchers, however, believe that the great majority of chronic non-bacterial prostatitis patients are actually misdiagnosed IC patients. (See study above). Jordan Dimitrikov (Bulgaria) and colleagues presented one of the first studies of a large group of younger men with IC and his results are fascinating. They studied of 300 men (aged 15-40, median age 33) who had been previously diagnosed with prostatitis/chronic pelvic pain syndrome. A whopping 240 of these men had evidence of glomerulations upon hydrodistention. All patients with IC also reported burning or pain during and/or after ejaculation. While this can be discouraging at first read, it is important for our male readers to see that we are making progress. We predict that IC/CPPS will be eventually and equally diagnosed in men and women. With those higher population statistics, we're bound to attract yet more researchers and companies with promising treatments to the cause.