There is room for both. I also went to SPOHNC meetings in the first couple of months. I think that each group in each city is very different (I went to three different ones in so cal) Any group is as strong as the most knowledgeable people in it. That was the problem I had with my face to face groups, no one knew very much. Where they really excelled was the human emotional aspect of it. But I didn't learn things that helped me from my contemporaries there, we were all right out of or still in treatment. One did have a nurse as the moderator, but she didn't know much about non clinical things like research, HPV at the time, and stuff I wanted to explore. PLease do not take any of this as negative feelings about SPOHNC, whose founder, Nancy I like a lot. It's just trying to compare apples and oranges. I wish we took in the 7 figures a year that they do, but that's another story.

The second thing I didn't care for was a hurting as I was, I wanted to talk to someone regularly. I mean almost daily as I was trying to sort out what I was feeling, and finding out about my disease. The groups met once a month. (that's why I bounced around to three different cities, so I could talk to some one at least three times a month. All the groups were more than 1.5 hours drive away, and this took some serious motivation and time to make things happen for me.

When I started OCF, the forum was meant to overcome what I found lacking in those groups. But obviously it lacks the personal touch, look in the face, hear the tone of the voice components of a face to face cancer support group.

So I think there is a place for both ideas, and both serve valuable functions even though they are very different mechanisms for accomplishing the same thing. Having said that, I occasionally post on some head and neck cancer list serves, and another web support group. They are nothing like OCF, and there is on one of them, no regulation of things that people put out there, some of which is completely wrong info, part of it harmful. Some people have left OCF in the past because it isn't a democracy, or we were hard on alternative therapies. I understand their feelings, but I also believe that we must be careful what we advocate for. So for some, the oversight part of OCF is not their cup of tea.