Decoding the Diagnosis: What Every Family Needs to Know
Dr. Nynikka Palmer, UCSF Breaks Down the Different Types of Prostate Cancer and How Treatment Options Differ
Prostate cancer is one of the most survivable cancers there is — when it's caught early and understood clearly. And yet, Black men are diagnosed at higher rates and are more than twice as likely to die from it than their white peers.
On this episode of Love Letters to Our Bodies, we sat down with Dr. Nynikka Palmer, DrPH, MPH, an Associate Professor at UCSF whose career has been devoted to understanding — and closing — that gap.
We started where every family should start: with the basics. What actually is a PSA test, and what do the numbers mean? What is a Gleason score, and how is it different? How do you know whether a diagnosis is the slow-growing kind of prostate cancer, or the kind that needs to be acted on quickly? Dr. Palmer walked us through all of it, in language any of us can bring home to our fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons.
“There are a lot of treatment options [for prostate cancer]; there’s not just one way to treat it.” — Dr. Nynikka Palmer
From there, we talked about what to actually do with that knowledge — when Black men should start getting screened, what to ask a doctor, and how the women in a family often become the reason a man follows through on care. We closed with the support and peer navigation work Dr. Palmer leads here in the Bay Area, and one simple thing every listener can say to the man in their life who's been avoiding that appointment.
“The problem I have seen the most is that we’re not getting men into the doctor early enough for anything.” — Dr. Nynikka Palmer
This conversation is for every daughter, wife, sister, and mother who has ever wondered how to start this conversation at home. Early conversations save lives — and so does understanding the words your doctor uses.
Listen to the full episode now, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Love Letters to Our Bodies is a production of Moyo Institute, Inc., dedicated to holistic healing, wholeness, and the lived experiences of African American women.
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