What do any of you really think we are doing here with our free-wheeling program of compassionate support and information? Is it that we are just looking for the plain facts? We get all those facts, and we explain and share them with each other. Where do we get our facts? We read, and many of us are patients of the most experienced GIST experts anywhere. We ask them for the facts, and they tell us what they know. One of the things we do so well for each other here at GSI is to share among ourselves, as well as we can in plain language, the gist of what our sarcoma specialists know and can tell us about our GIST, its treatment prospects and ongoing studies.

We have good relationships with our GIST experts. Our experts keep no medical secrets from us, nor do we keep any from them. But what our experts know, and what they can tell us about our individual prospects, is all too often not enough. We need something more, and we are providing it for ourselves, and receiving it here in GSI. We are in therapy with each other.

Don’t argue with me about that, please. I have been an accredited and licensed therapist for more than fifty years. After so many years of training and long and hard practice, I have become rather expert at therapy’s various tasks, schools of thought, and aspects. At the very least, I know therapy when I see it, and most certainly when I experience it. Do you?

Let us look at our GSI. Why do many of us post so repeatedly, so faithfully, so hopefully, so trustingly and warmly to this GSI group and to each other? GSI is no cold classroom. Whatever else we are, ask yourself, “Is GSI not a Home-Grown Cognitive and Supportive Group Therapy Program in Cyberspace Without a Leader or a Fee?”

GSI is often, and quite spontaneously, a therapeutic kind of thing, the thing it ought to be, because it does bring better things for you and me. We actually and intentionally do many good things for and with each other here on GSI. And that, my friends, is therapy. Take my word for it. I am an old Clinical Professor, and an expert.