Online communities - are they the best way to get help and guidance for all life's issues?

I do often think that death and cancer are strange taboos given that so many of us are affected by them directly or indirectly.

A study published this week by Lorraine Buis and coworkers looked at online communities for cancer sufferers (see article here). Apparently cancer sufferers are increasingly being pointed in the direction of these communities to get information and emotional support. The aim was to see if there was a link between the survival rates for the cancer and what people tended to be talking about on the forum.

The results were as follows:

• Online support communities for high survival rate cancers are more orientated towards emotional support than forums for cancers with low survival rates.
  

• Support communities for low survival rate cancers contain more information than online support communities for high survival rate cancers.

The authors hope that this work can help the medical profession make informed decisions when recommending online communities. In this case the families of those who passed away are clearly going to have very different thoughts and priorities to survivors and their loved ones. They will therefore participate in communities in different ways and perhaps not always be providing what their fellow community members might need. I wonder how prevalent this type of discrepancy is in online forums in general?