May 06, 2001

Elliot posted why he was skeptical. I once was, too . Here is why I am no longer skeptical.

(1) Most of my questions have been answered satisfactorily.

(a) Is Dr. Feliciano legitimate?

Certainly. Ron's, Dave's, and Brad's reports make that clear. Dr. Feliciano is not a charlatan working miracle cures.

(b) How could microbes that he finds be missed in the U.S.?

First, some of them require specific tests.

You don't find them if you don't look for them. Dr. Feliciano casts a broad net that includes some of these specific tests routinely. U.S. doctors that didn't suspect them would not find them. Moreover, they might not see other indications and might not suspect them as prostatic infections.

Second, contamination is not a likely explanation.

The possibility that his laboratory has a contamination problem, resulting in "finding" spurious things, is obviously eliminated by the fact that his cultures show the effects of the therapy that his patients have undergone, that is, patients who have been cured are found to be pathogen-free. If there had been some peculiar contamination problem, this would not have been true.

Third, U.S. Doctors generally only do urine cultures.

It is my impression that standard urological practice in the U.S. is to concentrate on urine cultures, in the belief that prostatic infections will show up there. Only relatively rarely are EPS or semen cultured. No one in the U.S. uses Dr. Feliciano's technique of repeated, increasingly vigorous massages (drainages) that may break up pockets of infection and release their contents for culture. Thus, Dr. Feliciano does much more comprehensive and careful sampling than urologists in the U.S. do.

(c) How can Dr. Feliciano and Dr Tarfusser both be right? Dr Tarfusser often finds that the problem is with clogged seminal vesicles. How can Dr. Feliciano have such a high success rate without dealing with seminal vesicles? There is still something to be answered here, but there are several plausible possbilities.

First, they could be dealing with different patient populations.

Second, since Dr. Feliciano's cultures probably reveal the pathogens that infect the seminal vesicles (same as those infecting the prostate), he chooses the right antibiotics, and they are effective on both organs. Perhaps the seminal vesicles often don't need massage in order for symptoms to resolve, once the right antibiotic is found.

Third, Dr. Feliciano may reach the seminal vesicles, or part of them, in his drainages, thereby helping unclog them just as he does with the prostate.

(2) Brad's 2 weeks of observation, detailed analysis of 35 recent cases, and highly favorable report are very significant to me. Brad is an MD, and I've seen from his earlier posts that he is inherently skeptical. Taking his father's case as a clue, he studied the prostatitis literature, found it lacking in logic, and openly challenged conventional wisdom (favoring a bacterial hypothesis for "nonbacterial" prostatitis and prostatodynia) before (I think) he became aware of Dr. Feliciano's work. The fact that he is now convinced that Dr. Feliciano's method works carries a lot of weight with me.

(3) Dr. Feliciano's ideas are completely logical and his findings support them completely. That the encapsulation of infection should be the big problem in diagnosis and treatment should be no surprise to anyone. The big news is that he has found successful ways to deal with this.
   

Postscript: I posted the message above over 5 years ago. Since it   accurately expressed my beliefs at the time, I have no objection to  Dr. Feliciano's including it here. However, a lot has happened since then. In particular, a large amount of new data has been gathered by very intelligent and dedicated scientists, some of whom have also presented new theories of CPPS. As I understand the situation currently, it is believed that a regimen of culture-guided antibiotics with prostate massage is effective in a relatively small fraction of American CPPS patients.
 
My own experience with our local effort to duplicate Dr. A. E. Feliciano's protocol was partially positive.

(a) A hard nodule on my prostate, which had caused my urologist to order a biopsy a year earlier, disappeared. It has not returned over the several years since.
(b) My EPS became water-white and crystal clear. (I  understand that this is considered to be abnormal.)
(c) All cultures became negative.
(d) My EPS pH normalized.
(e) I had partial relief of pain symptoms (but only partial).

I believe that some patients who are given the diagnosis CPPS, NIH Category III, may belong instead in Category II, chronic bacterial prostatitis, but I doubt that this is true of a large fraction of
Category III patients. I see CPPS as set of conditions for which infecting organisms are not likely to be primary, even though some of these conditions may somehow involve bacteria and/or yeasts in secondary roles.
 

Disclaimer:
I wrote "Why I Am No Longer Skeptical About Dr. Feliciano's Treatment" long ago, before this treatment had received much scrutiny and at a time when people had high hopes for it.  I no longer believe that it can provide a cure for very many people.  I now believe that for most cases of chronic prostatitis, bacteria are probably not the primary cause. - John Garst, 19 Nov 2002

note: John Garst has never been a patient of Dr. Feliciano