WASHINGTON — It took eight agonizing months for Charles Linzey to decide how to treat his early-stage prostate cancer. His wife, in contrast, had her early-stage breast cancer surgically removed just a month after diagnosis.

It’s not that the Baltimore businessman was less decisive. Instead, Linzey ran into a distressing reality: Unlike with breast cancer and many other malignancies, doctors simply couldn’t tell him which therapy was a better bet for the leading male cancer.

There is little good research directly comparing prostate treatment options to help the newly diagnosed choose between surgery, two types of radiation, or watching a small tumor to see if it needs treating at all.

“I never felt comfortable, even when I made my choice, with my choice. Because no one would say, ‘That’s a good choice,’” says Linzey, 59, who ultimately went with implanted radioactive “seeds” and is faring well.

Two new studies suggest the advice gap has consequences: overtreating early-stage tumors, and therapy choices driven by fear and misperceptions.

“When we give people choices, it’s sometimes more difficult,” acknowledges Dr. John B. Fiveash, a radiation oncologist at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, who is at the forefront of a fledgling trend to try to change that - through specialized prostate clinics.

Key for patients to know: “Not all prostate cancer is the same,” stresses Dr. John T. Wei, a University of Michigan urologist who recently reported that about 55 percent of men with low-risk tumors are overtreated, unnecessarily exposing them to such side effects as impotence and incontinence.

Certainly aggressive prostate cancer can kill. But often, prostate cancer is so slow-growing, and discovered when it’s so small, that men will die of something else before it ever causes symptoms, much less becomes life-threatening.

One man in every six will get prostate cancer, but only one in 34 will die of it, the American Cancer Society says.

That sounds reassuring until you’re the man wondering if you’ll be in the lucky majority or not. Unfortunately, doctors have no easy way to tell.

Adding to the confusion: Studies are contradictory about whether aggressive treatment really improves a low-risk man’s long-term chances of survival - or if a better option might be to closely monitor the tumor and treat it only if it starts to grow, so that he doesn’t endure side effects until he really has to.

And while some older studies do suggest that radiation and surgery recipients fare equally well for up to 10 years, Fiveash laments that there are no direct comparisons of more modern surgical and radiation techniques, including more precisely targeted, potentially safer ways to deliver radiation.

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August 25, 2006 - A bubble bath that improves memory – that gets the attention of most senior citizens. A kitchen cleaner that wards off nausea and energizes. A scented handkerchief that calms a patient entering the MRI. The benefits of aromatherapy are real, according to the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. A cancer specialist shares her advice on using oils for healing.

Aromatherapy is the use of oils extracted from plants to alleviate physical and psychological disorders, usually through massage or inhalation.

Scan the shelves of the local bath and body stores and one is sure to find products labeled for aromatherapy. Many might be surprised to learn the science behind it. So what is aromatherapy, how is it used and will those products actually work?

Cherie Perez, a supervising research nurse in the Department of Genitourinary Medical Oncology, teaches a monthly aromatherapy class to answer those questions for cancer patients and caregivers undergoing treatment at M. D. Anderson Cancer Center.

Perez’s classes are offered free of charge through M. D. Anderson’s Place of wellness, a center within the institution that focuses on helping patients and caregivers deal with the non-medical issues of living with cancer, and is the first complementary therapy facility to be built on the campus of a comprehensive cancer center.

Perez, who first became involved with aromatherapy to help relieve the physical pain and discomfort caused by fibromyalgia, shares her professional knowledge of the basics of aromatherapy, safety precautions and interactive demonstrations in each hour-long class.

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