I was a spouse/caregiver to an cancer patient. I became intensely interested in cancer medicine by virtue of working through, enduring and surviving my wife's illness.
Although I had a college education, the experience helped me to gather knowledge by virtue of voluminous reading and hundreds of hours of past and "ongoing" personal communication with noted authorities and experts in the field. I still keep in touch with many of them (surgeons, medical and radiation oncologists).
Although retired, privately, I've been a student of Cell Function Analysis. I do not have any financial conflicts of interest raising the awareness of this technology. On the internet, my point with respect to this systematic procedure is to educate patients and others that such techniques exist, and might be very valuable.
To paraphrase Martin Luther King Jr: "A scientific communication should be judged on the quality of its content and only secondarily, or not at all, on the qualifications of its author."
http://pathology2.jhu.edu/ovca/story.cfm?PersonID=33