What I didnt know about my prostate almost killed me [Video]

Editor’s Note: Ed Manning is a media executive and prostate cancer survivor. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.

Recently, a misfiring prostate launched Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to the forefront of the headlines, followed by the deaths of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s son, Dexter, and O.J. Simpson from prostate cancer. While their celebrity status drove the news, their underlying illnesses earned little more than a parenthetical shrug. In the blink of a news cycle, prostate cancer was again casually swept aside as among the best cancer to have.

Treatments are often downplayed as “minimally invasive,” as if they were no more consequential than a teeth cleaning. As a prostate cancer survivor, I can report from painful experience that those misguided assessments are to men’s health and longevity what ice was to the Titanic.

In the shadows of more celebrated organs afflicted by …