Useful Internet Sites About Prostate Disease
Accessing Information from the Web about Increasingly Common Disease
Nov 6, 2009
As the world's population ages, symptoms related to disease of the prostate gland are becoming relatively common. Learning about your condition - whether it is benign enlargement of the prostate gland or prostate cancer - can help you to understand your situation and so take an active part in making choices about your medical care.
Many folks, when they want to access information from the web these days, simply type in a couple of keywords related to the subject they want to research into a search engine like Google and then hit the Enter key - and are then bewildered by the thousands of sites available to them.
But with so much information available on the internet, how does one know which sites to believe - and which sites are just the work of someone who has a dodgy product to sell, a particularly nasty bee in their bonnet or a dangerous agenda they want to pursue?
In addition to the men's health section of Suite 101, what other sites are recommended?
Lions Australia
A particularly good website from which non-medically trained individuals can obtain useful information is the Lions Australian Prostate Cancer website at http://www.prostatehealth.org.au/.
This site, which is maintained as a service by the Lions Club of Australia, provides information written in user-friendly language about the disease - testing for prostate cancer, how the PSA test is interpreted and so on.
Andrology Australia
Another useful site is the one maintained by Andrology Australia (the Australian Centre of Excellence in Male Reproductive Health), which has information not only about prostate disease, but also other conditions of interest to males such as male infertility, erectile dysfunction,, testicular disease and testosterone use and misuse .
Medline Plus
A third very good website which is of particular benefit for North American users is called Medline Plus - a joint initiative of America's National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health. This too provides easy to understand information - backed by the stamp of authority of America's top body, the NIH. This site deals not only with prostate disease - it provides accurate information on various health matters written in such a simple style that even those without any medical background can easily comprehend.
In the 21st century, information is freely available - and anyone with access to a computer and the internet can access this information. It is important to remember that similarly, anyone else with a computer and access to the internet can likewise post such information - with all the danger that this implies.
A good internet source of health advice should be one that demystifies without distorting medical information - one that provides advice and answers that people find useful and relevant.
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