The College of American Pathologists recently revamped its excellent Web resource for patients and their families looking for information regarding biopsy reports and disease processes called MyBiopsy.org. I have referred our local oncologists to this site as a resource for their patients. Patients and their families can be assured as high quality and unbiased content from this site.
I "test-drove" a few of the topic sites, including breast-invasive ductal carcinoma, colon-adenocarcinoma, and blood-CLL. The site is easy to navigate around. Individual topics are organized in a user-friendly frequently-asked-questions format. I especially like the section on questions to ask your doctor and the compact packet of information. It is easy for patients who have received a cancer diagnosis and venture onto the Web to be overwhelmed with information (good, bad, and otherwise). MyBiopsy.org does a nice job of not trying to be all-inclusive. The breast-invasive ductal carcinoma site includes information about and a link to the new ER/PR guidelines and presents it in a general, non-threatening manner. The colon-adenocarcinoma site similarly does a good job; I would have explained the idea of staging a little further but perhaps other sites that are hyperlinked (like ASCO's Cancer.net) go into that in more detail. The Blood-CLL site could be improved by explaining more about what the pathologist does to make a diagnosis, e.g., examining the peripheral blood smear for abnormal lymphocyte cells. Further, the associated images compare CLL with neutrophils instead of normal lymphocytes.
The site fills a need for patients seeking answers to elements of their biopsy reports. But it is almost exclusively focused on cancer diagnoses. A further development might be to provide a general topic site explaining the process involved from processing a specimen to producing a report as well as including common non-neoplastic diseases which are biopsied (e.g., Barrett's esophagus/reflux esophagitis, gastritis, endometrial biopsies for bleeding, etc.).
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