Prostate massage

Prostate massage is the massage or stimulation of the male prostate gland for sexual stimulation or medical purposes.

The prostate takes part in the sexual response cycle, and is essential for the production of semen. Due to its proximity to the anterior rectal wall, it can be stimulated from the anterior wall of the rectum or externally via the perineum.

Prostate massage is part of the digital rectal examination (DRE) routinely given to men by urologists in order to look for nodules of prostate cancer and to obtain an expressed prostatic secretion (EPS) specimen for microscopy and microbiological culture to screen for prostatitis.

In the late 1990s, a small number of doctors tried prostate massage in conjunction with antibiotics for the treatment of chronic bacterial prostatitis with uncertain results. In recent trials, however, prostate massage was not shown to improve outcomes compared to antibiotics alone. As a consequence of these findings, prostate massage is not officially sanctioned in western medicine for the treatment of any medical disorder today. Prostatic massage should never be performed on patients with acute prostatitis, because the infection can spread elsewhere in the body if massage is performed.

Once the most popular therapeutic maneuver used to treat prostatitis, it was abandoned as primary therapy in the 1960s.

In the late 1990s the ineffectiveness of drug treatments for chronic prostatitis led to a brief resurgence of interest in prostate massage. In a recent trial, however, prostate massage was not shown to improve outcomes compared to antibiotics alone.

The practice is still used in some parts of China.

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Wikipedia