mod_perl handler generated proxy requests

[Marc D. Spencer]

I have a mod_perl module which would like to make an HTTP request to 
a tertiary server and then process the result before possibly 
returning some subset of that data.

I have already written a working solution via LWP, but I got to 
wondering, as I sometimes do, whether there is a better way to do it 
via a sub-request and mod_proxy.

Has anyone done this? Is this a better or worse approach compared to 
LWP? And if it's better, could you point me toward some code?