Prostate massage is the massage or stimulation of the male prostate gland for medical purposes or sexual stimulation. The prostate takes part in the sexual response cycle , and is essential for the production of semen.
Due to its proximity to the anterior rectal wall, it can be stimulated from the anterior wall of the rectum or externally via the perineum. Prostate massage is part of the digital rectal examination DRE routinely given to men by urologists in order to look for nodules of prostate cancer and to obtain an expressed prostatic secretion EPS specimen for microscopy and microbiological culture to screen for prostatitis. In the late s, a small number of doctors tried prostate massage in conjunction with antibiotics for the treatment of chronic bacterial prostatitis with uncertain results.
Prostatic massage should never be performed on patients with acute prostatitis , because the infection can spread elsewhere in the body if massage is performed. Once the most popular therapeutic maneuver used to treat prostatitis, it was abandoned as primary therapy in the s.
In the late s, the ineffectiveness of drug treatments for chronic prostatitis led to a brief resurgence of interest in prostate massage. The practice is still used in some parts of China. Vigorous prostate massage has been documented to have injurious consequences: periprostatic hemorrhage , [ 7 ] cellulitis , septicaemia , possible disturbance and metastasis of prostate cancer to other parts of the body, and hemorrhoidal flare-up, and rectal fissures.
Electroejaculation is a procedure in which nerves are stimulated via an electric probe, which is inserted into the rectum adjacent to the prostate. The stimulus voltage stimulates nearby nerves, resulting in contraction of the pelvic muscles and ejaculation. It is most commonly encountered in animal husbandry for the purpose of collecting semen samples for testing or breeding.
