Ed Everest's Guide to the World's Best Cancer Websites
The home page address is www.bestcancersites.comTHE BEST LIVER CANCER WEBSITES
The address of this page is www.bestcancersites.com/liverThis is a summary of the best websites I could find around the world for liver cancer, both for general information (symptoms, treatment options, research, etc) and for forums (message or discussion boards) and other kinds of support. And for those living in Australia there is information about Australian websites here.
If you are looking for information on liver cancers and their treatment, the best place to go is the website of the USA government's National Cancer Institute (USA) at www.cancer.gov. The section devoted to liver cancer gives an easy to read and easy to understand description of what liver cancers are, how they are diagnosed, treatment options, descriptions of treatments, and more.
The direct link is Liver Cancer, or go to their home page, find the heading “Types of Cancer” and click on the link “A to Z List of Cancers” and look for Liver.
The American Cancer Society, a voluntary organisation, runs one of the most comprehensive websites on cancer and cancer-related matters on the net. Their address is www.cancer.org. There's information about liver cancer on their website but because it's such a large site you need to search it out. Find and click on the link "Choose a cancer topic" on their home page and choose Liver Cancer from the list that displays, and click on Go. They have many other resources too for those involved with cancer so it's well worth browsing their site for additional information and support that may be relevant to your situation.
I have been unable to find any comprehensive websites devoted to liver cancer that are run by support groups or non-commercial organisations.
The best site I could find that is run by a commercial organisation is
“The Liver Cancer Network” at www.livercancer.com. They describe it as “Presented by The Liver Program at Allegheny General Hospital, this web site has been designed to provide information about the liver and liver cancer. Allegheny General Hospital is one of a select group of medical institutions throughout the United States to have a program devoted solely to treating patients with liver cancer. Our goal is simple -- to provide liver cancer patients and their families with the basic knowledge needed to better communicate with their physicians and to give patients and families hope for the future.”You need to keep in mind when visiting sites such as this one that the operators have a commercial interest in attracting patients to their particular facilities, treatments and trials.
The National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) is “an alliance of 19 of the world's leading cancer centers, ... an authoritative source of information to help patients and health professionals make informed decisions about cancer care. Through the collective expertise of its member institutions, the NCCN develops, updates, and disseminates a complete library of clinical practice guidelines. These guidelines are the standard for clinical policy in oncology” - (quoted from their website). If you want to take a role in planning your course of treatment in consultation with your medical health providers then you may find these guidelines valuable.
A physician-friendly version of the NCCN guidelines for liver cancer can be found by going to this webpage www.nccn.org/professionals/physician_gls/default.asp, and a patient-friendly version may in the future be prepared in collaboration with the American Cancer Society and a link to it put here www.nccn.org/patients/patient_gls.asp
Mailing lists provide a way of getting in touch with others involved with liver cancer and for sharing information and support. There is a list called 'LIVER-ONC The Liver Cancer Support Group' - 214 subscribers on 5th September 2006 - hosted by the Association of Cancer Online Resources (ACOR) - to find the list go to the ACOR website at www.acor.org and click on 'Mailing Lists Center' near the top of the page. It may also be worth searching through their index of mailing lists to look for any other lists that may be relevant to your situation.
If you want to delve deeper into any aspect of cancer, a good source of information is Medlineplus at www.medlineplus.gov. It's a service of the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the National Institute of Health and it’s a big well-organised and easily searchable site. The link to the section on cancers is www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/cancers.html and the link to their section on liver cancer is www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/livercancer.html.
Here’s some background from their home page:
Medlineplus - “A service of the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the National Institute of Health”
“Welcome to MedlinePlus, a goldmine of good health information from the world's largest medical library, the National Library of Medicine. Health professionals and consumers alike can depend on it for information that is authoritative and up to date. MedlinePlus has extensive information from the National Institutes of Health and other trusted sources on over 650 diseases and conditions. There are also lists of hospitals and physicians, a medical encyclopedia and a medical dictionary, health information in Spanish, extensive information on prescription and nonprescription drugs, health information from the media, and links to thousands of clinical trials. MedlinePlus is updated daily and can be bookmarked at the URL: medlineplus.gov."Cancercare is a large USA-based organisation "that provides free, professional support services for anyone affected by cancer." On their website at www.cancercare.org you can find some information resources, advice on such matters as financial assistance, and counseling services (online, telephone and face-to-face). There are also some online support groups or forums.
The website RxList at www.rxlist.com - self-described as “The Internet Drug Index providing fast, reliable information to both the consumer and the medical professional” - has information about hundreds of medicinal drugs and also active forums or discussion boards on the more popular drugs as well as forums for discussing less popular drugs and alternative therapies. The link to their forums index page is www.rxlist.com/rxboard.htm.
If you have concerns about fertility in relation to cancer and its treatment, go to this page www.bestcancersites.com/fertility for links to websites with information and support on fertility issues (and you can use your back button to return to this page).
There are links to lymphedema websites on this page www.bestcancersites.com/lymphedema (and you can use your back button to return here).
A good website for finding clinical trials relating to any type of cancer is the USA Government’s National Cancer Institute site at www.cancer.gov - go to their home page and click on the link Clinical Trials, or click on this direct link www.cancer.gov/clinicaltrials.
There’s another USA Government website called ClinicalTrials.gov at www.clinicaltrials.gov where you can search for trials. “ClinicalTrials.gov offers up-to-date information for locating federally and privately supported clinical trials for a wide range of diseases and conditions” and “ClinicalTrials.gov currently contains approximately 12,600 clinical studies sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, other federal agencies, and private industry. Studies listed in the database are conducted in all 50 States and in over 100 countries. ClinicalTrials.gov receives over 4 million page views per month and hosts approximately 17,000 visitors daily.”
I suggest starting your search for clinical trials with the National Cancer Institute site at www.cancer.gov and then trying the ClinicalTrials.gov site. I don't know if ClinicalTrials.gov includes the same database as the NCI site but it doesn’t use the same search form so it might turn up something different anyway. Both sites include trials around the world as well as those in the USA.
You could also try the “American Cancer Society /EmergingMed Clinical Trials Matching Service ... This free Clinical Trial Matching and Referral Service is made available to American Cancer Society visitors through a collaboration with EmergingMed. ... Fill out one questionnaire and within seconds you'll know if your profile matches any clinical trials in our system. The EmergingMed database contains more than 3,000 clinical trials for treatment, prevention and early detection of cancer.” Look for the link to clinical trials on the home page of the American Cancer Society or try this direct link http://clinicaltrials.cancer.org .
NORD - the National Organisation for Rare Disorders - on their website at www.rarediseases.org has a database of rare disorders including many rare cancers. The database gives a list of alternative names for each disorder, some basic information about the disorder, and a list of organisations related to that disorder.
There are links to nutrition and excercise guidelines on this webpage nutrition and excercise guidelines.
For anyone considering trying an alternative treatment for cancer (one that is not mainstream medicine and scientifically demonstrated to be safe and beneficial) the website Quackwatch has a very good section on their site called “A Special Message for Cancer Patients Seeking "Alternative" Treatments”. It will help you decide whether an alternative treatment you are considering is safe and might be beneficial in some way, or whether it might be unsafe and/or fraudulent. The direct link is www.quackwatch.org/00AboutQuackwatch/altseek.html or you can find the link on their home page at www.quackwatch.org.
The American Cancer Society website has a valuable section called "Complementary and Alternative Therapies". It's buried deep in their website and difficult to find - there's no link to it from their home page. Try this direct link www.cancer.org/docroot/ETO/ETO_5.asp?sitearea=ETO or else put the word alternative into the search window on the home page and look for a link to the section in the search results. If you're thinking of trying a specific alternative or complimentary treatment you've come across on the internet or elsewhere you may find information about it in this section.
Another website that discusses the subject of alternative treatments in some detail is the website of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine at www.nccam.nih.gov.
The American Cancer Society has a very good information page giving advice on how to use the internet for finding information on cancer, and how to determine if that information is reliable. The direct link to it is Cancer Information on the Internet.
More suggestions please
If you know of any other good liver cancer websites large or small, or active forums (message or discussion boards) or mailing lists on liver cancer you would like to see added to this page, or you find any errors or broken links, please send me an email at everest@bestcancersites.com.
Ed Everest, Adelaide, Australia
Page updated 5th September 2006
Australian Liver Cancer Websites
There do not appear to be any websites based in Australia devoted to liver cancer.
There are annotated links to Australian general cancer websites on this webpage Australian general cancer websites (it opens in a new window). Please do check it out - you'll find websites listed there with a wide variety of information relevant to Australia (including lists of support groups and treatment centres) that you won't find on the websites described above.More suggestions please
If you know of any other good liver cancer websites large or small, or active forums (message or discussion boards) or mailing lists on liver cancer you would like to see added to this page, or you find any errors or broken links, please send me an email at everest@bestcancersites.com.
Ed Everest, Adelaide, Australia
Page updated 5th September 2006
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