The Healthy Prostate
What Can Go Wrong
Men, try this simple exercise. With your clothes off, stand up straight facing a full-length mirror. Place one finger on your naval, then run it straight down until you reach a slightly depressed area in your groin directly above the point where the visible upper end of your penis disappears into your body. Gently push in - the hard area you feel is your pelvic bone. Now turn sideways and visualize a point inside your body behind your pelvic bone, about a third of the distance between the tip of your finger and your buttocks. Now you know the general location of your prostate gland. If you are a healthy, young, adult male, your prostate will be about the size of a golf ball.
What Is the Prostate - What Does It Do
The prostate gland or the "prostate" is actually a combination of several small glands encased in an outer shell. The structure of the prostate resembles an orange with a firm outer skin and soft pulpy center. The individual glands inside that pulpy center do all the work, the hard outer skin provides protection.
All glands are little chemical factories that produce complex substances you need for various purposes throughout your body. Curiously, medical science has yet to understand fully the prostate's function. It produces some but not all of the cloudy white fluid known as semen or ejaculate, probably its principal activity. Semen is the fluid medium that transports sperm cells, the male contribution to human reproduction.
The prostate may have several other functions. Some researchers speculate the prostate produces important enzymes or other chemicals. The exit ducts from the prostate lead directly into the urethra, the passage inside the penis through which semen exits the body, so the function of these chemicals should be limited to processes within the prostate or possibly reproduction. In the latter case, substances from the prostate may stimulate activity of sperm, thereby enhancing female impregnation. The prostate undergoes mechanical contractions during ejaculation that may also facilitate sperm movement.
All women have tiny glands that have been called "the female prostate," just as men have vestigial nipples. In their early stages of development, male and female fetuses are essentially the same physically. When the male hormone testosterone appears in the male fetus, the prostate begins to grow. At the same location in the female fetus, however, cells grow more slowly, forming the vestigial female prostate. The female prostate sometimes causes problems, but never as often and rarely as seriously as the male prostate does in men.
