Joel B. Nelson, MD

One should not advise a patient with low- or very-low-risk prostate cancer to undergo a focal ablation. The kindest and gentlest approach is to first do no harm.

How should oncologists advise patients about the best surgical approach to use to treat their prostate cancer? Quite simply, it is the surgeon, not the approach. The self-fulfilling prophecy about surgery is that the best surgeons tend to do the most surgeries, so an easy metric is volume.