My father's reasoning is that since he is already 73 years old and prostate cancer is a relatively slowly progressing cancer, he does not want to trade away potential loss in quality of life with treatment since there may be complications with treatment anyway along with lifelong side effects like incontinence.
Well lets start with some facts -- there are thousands of RALP surgeries done every year, and most men don't have incontinence. I've got none, full continence by about six weeks after surgery.
Get yourself to a first rate cancer center with a doc who performs a LOT of these procedures. Outcomes are better with "high volume" surgeons (eg someone who's doing hundreds of procedures a year -- my doc had done 3000 or so by the time he got to me).
Also - there are now a range of alternatives to surgery, things like HiFu (High Frequency Focussed Ultrasound) - which is neither surgery nor radiation -- for which he might be a candidate. Gotta get to a first rate cancer center and ask.
. . . but your Dad is making a point which _might_ be reasonable, but might not.
Some prostate cancer patients won't benefit much net/net from early intervention. "Watchful waiting" basically means waiting for symptoms to occur then treating them then, usually with drug therapy. For _some_ people, this may be appropriate. 73 is a tricky age, because he is older, and on _average_ a person of that age has only 12 years of life remaining. So its not as though he doesn't have a point, but there are a lot of questions to be asked.
Its a difficult decision to make. I would recommend that he talk to an oncologist - rather than an urologist -- about the choices that are available and have a hard look at the numbers. Oncologists tend to have a different lens on these issues than do urologists.
so in his opinion, he may pass away from something else besides prostate cancer anyway and does not see the point of treatment that may worsen his current quality of life.
- you'd kinda like to get that medical opinion from a doc, rather than to just conjecture it yourself.