The role of surgery in the treatment of hormone refractory prostatic cancer is extremely limited. Rarely, patients with locally advanced, uncontrollable, non-metastatic prostatic cancer enjoy prolonged survival. However, these patients represent an extremely small percentage of patients with prostatic cancer. Radical surgery should be applied to palliate selected patients with uncontrollable local symptoms. However, prostate cancer rarely behaves in a manner necessitating this type of intervention and thus only rarely do patients require radical surgery for local palliation.