There were a couple of manly stories in the medical field that are of interest to older guys. They are trying to decide if getting the blood test for prostate cancer is worthwhile after 75 years of age. It seems that the disease takes so long to kill you that the treatment is worse than the disease for the older men. The assumption is that the normal patient won’t live past about 85. I know a few much older men, and expect to know more as the baby boomers move up. The same discussion happens with lots of treatments and the conclusion is pretty consistent- yes treat old people if they have something medically wrong. The other story is in the same area, at least anatomically. Without prostate cancer, men don’t seem to have a whole lot more problems with bowel and bladder control as they age from 50 to 70 and 80. It is not “normal: to develop problems there. It is normal to have a little more trouble with what they call now ED. It’s certainly not universal but a Dutch study of 3800 men showed that many have a need for help, the kind Bob Dole was endorsing a few years ago. Oddly enough there was one other connected story, that doesn’t have quite the same focus. I read these so you don’t have to. It seems they were trying to deliver anti-cancer drugs to specific tissue in the brains of lab rats and found Viagra (Senator Dole’s little blue friend) and Levitra, another ED drug, were effective in getting the cancer drug to the tumor without affecting the rest of the brain. How’s that for improving potency?If you find a mistake in any of my columns, please remember that I do try to write something for everyone and some people just love looking for mistakes, so I try to add something for them.