Hi:
I'm Ron Reiner and I was diagnosed with PD last September. I am 48 years
old and married with one child (12 yrs old). I live in Arlington, VA where
I work as a technical manager in a telecommunications firm. My symptoms are
still mild (so my doctor tells me). I am on Eldepryl and Permax.
I'm used to interacting with Newsgroups instead of this mailing list format.
I noticed that there is discussion about forming a Newsgroup. As I lurk
around this forum I am beginning to see some of the advantages of this well
organized and well run mail server. However, I think there are advantages
to newsgroups as well.
I suppose that most of you are aware that there are numerous medical
newsgroups already such as alt.support.sleep-disorder, alt.support.tourette
and alt.support.mult-sclerosis. In fact, it was by accidentally stumbling
on alt.support.sleep-disorder that I discovered that "restless legs" was a
disease and that there was a way of relieving symptoms. This simple
revelation improved my life dramtically. This is one advantage of a
newsgroup that no one has mentioned - its simple accessibility may help draw
a much larger following. When I was first diagnosed with PD, my first act
was to search for "the" relevant newsgroup.
There are two types of newsgroups - moderated and unmoderated. The
moderated ones are controlled by a moderator who can easily keep out the
riff-raff such as spams and inappropriate materials. I'm no expert in this
area, but I would guess that the marginal effort required to moderate a
newsgroup using the listerver as the sole source of postings may be quite
small. If so, we can have our cake and eat it too. (easy for me to say!).
Alternatively, why not create an unmoderated, INDEPENDENT
alt.support.parkinsons newsgroup? Very little suppport would be required
People could have a choice of participating in one or both media.
I hope that this is not too presumptous for my first posting.
Ron Reiner ([log in to unmask])
