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to read various articles made available to them. Becoming well informed and highly educated about prostate cancer
appeared to be the primary focus of this listserv.
‘If you want to be a partner in your healing.’ One way to become an active patient was arm oneself with
the most up-to-date medical information available. One commented: “If you want to be partner in your healing then
put yourself on a closer level of communication and understanding.” To do this members of the list repeatedly
recommended and informed one another of articles to read and websites to visit. One patient responded to a
website in this way: "this is a really neat site. I explored the section "Neoplasia II, Causes and Effects of Cancer"
and found it really interesting." Another posted this message: "One of the best articles I've read is "Correlation of
Pathologic Findings with Progression after radical Retropubic Prostatectomy" by Epstein et al, which provides
probabilities of progression versus things like pathological Gleason score, organ confinement, specimen
confinement, PSA, and so on. Some of these articles appeared to be mandatory readings, in which participants were
expected to have read. Posters were asked to study options available in order to make informed decisions. The
resources referred to were elaborate and sophisticated. One of the online doctors made this suggestion to a newly
diagnosed member: "suggest you go to our homepage and print out papers on Early PC, parts I and II, Miranda for
the PC Patient, Neoadjuvant Therapy, Proscar for starters." Another patient received this message: “The Partin I
tables, as I have labeled them, use the clinical stage, not the stage for biopsies. Therefore you are using wrong input.
Suggest you recalculate with either T1c or T2a. Suggest you download our software program for calculation of
Partin tables and share with your docs. See our homepage...(apologies to the regular readers who must really hate
me for mentioning this for the 50th time, at least).” The administrator of a related website posted numerous
messages regarding new information of interest to Prostate Cancer patients and how to access that information. New
web pages that were considered to be helpful were announced such as in the following: “Just a note to let you know
that the Web Page, “Fundamentals of Prostate Cancer Detection”/ has been expanded and now includes over 20
references (with quotations) to articles concerning the two highly controversial questions of TO SCREEN OR NOT
TO SCREEN and TO TREAT OR NOT TO TREAT. .. The Page is intended to help the newcomer get started in the
process of becoming informed about the state of the art of CaP detection and treatment. He is encouraged to obtain
copies of the referenced articles, read them, draw his own conclusions, and go on from there (via further references
contained in the articles) to become well informed before deciding to be screened or, if diagnosed, whether or not to
be treated.” Patients conducted thorough research, becoming well informed of their particular case. One wrote: “My
Convention