Hi everyone,

Having been a member of the great forum for 3 1/2 years I have noticed that when we or a family member gets cancer, a lot of us want to find out as much as we can about the particular cancer type. This is perfectly normal. So a lot of us search the internet to find this info. I was no exception to this. I think we all have this need for extra knowledge as a means of helping us cope. When I started trawling through the many sites dealing with prostate cancer a few years ago, I was quite shocked to find such varying statistics and information. I am not medically trained but I quickly realized, some sites hadnt been updated for 4 to 5 years and as we all know, survival rates and treatments have improved and advanced a lot in that time. So I quickly realized I had to sort the wheat from the chaff. Some of the American sites were particulary bad as they are run either by large hospitals or pharmacutical companies. I found these sites were nearly alway biased towards using their particular services or products. In the end, I restricted my search's to Cancer Research , Macmillan or Prostate Cancer UK. as I found these three were always up to date and had unbiased information on their sites.

Now to the newspapers. I think most of us have seen the headlines similar to, "New Cancer Breakthrough Found" over the past few years. I accept the press have a duty to keep us informed but at the same time, their main business is selling papers. So after reading what they have published and then ckecking the same data on Cancer Research site, I often have trouble relating the two sets of information. Whilst some of the info is correct, what they dont mention is, the research is often at a very early stage and may well be many years of research and development needed before the treatment is available to cancer sufferes. The newspapers tend to glamorize things which leads people reading it having false expectations and raises their hopes unduly. Cancer sufferes dont need this for they are allready suffering from emotional turmiol, so now I take the newspaper articals with a pinch of salt and check it out on Cancer Research home page.

As usual, I welcome people's comment on what I have written and hope it may help someone, Brian