Monday, May 21, 20071
Medical bloggers are held to a double standard
So says Dr. Wes, when he compares patient privacy in case reports in JAMA and NEJM with what's going on in medical blogs:
While this concern is worthy of consideration, are we asking physician bloggers to uphold a double standard? While most physician bloggers I know are keenly aware of the perils of patient identity disclosure, it seems we must go to unprecedented lengths to conceal the identity of any case we discuss. This is in stark contrast to case reports discussed in prestigious medical journals like the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), which only requires that a release form be signed by an identifiable patient before publication.
Comments
Bloggers, get releases, and publish what you will.
To compare a personal diary with a scholarly journal and insist the standards and purposes are very similar --- similar enough to make bloggers efforts to conceal the medical condition and treatment of an individual evidence of a double-standard --- strikes me as fatuous.
A blog is a personal journal, not a medical journal. If you want to argue they should be more similar, or are a valuable new contribution to the art of medicine...a wiki-journal of sorts, that is one thing. But it seems to me obtaining releases prior to publication of identifying patient information is not an unjust standard.
8:38 AM
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