Should physician-bloggers be held to a higher standard?
So the question remains: should physician bloggers, including those who anonymously post, be required to meet certain standards in their postings, just as they are required to meet certain standards within their practice? If so, who becomes the upholder of these ethical guidelines?
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{ 3 comments }
ROFLMAO – Anyone who would expect peer reviewed type articles on a blog is an idiot! That is one of the most laughable ideas I have ever heard. Blogs are meant to be somewhat raw as they are works of journaling. I can’t imagine anyone thinking that blog informaiton is any more authoritative than what you find on the average bulletin board system.
I have never met anyone who actually thought they could diagnose themselves from blog information – from WebMD, yes. I often find myself encouraging friends and family to actually go see a doctor instead of asking me to do research on some weird disease they read an online friend had and think they are sharing symptoms thereof.
That is not an argument for “oversight”, just an extension of the normal social networking that occurs. Be honest, how many of us have sat around comparing our symptoms – or playing “I’m more miserable than you are.” game even when we aren’t really sick or suffering from anything? People do it all the time with or without medical personnel around.
And, as to professionalism. I, for one, have always believed that doctors were just highly trained people with an expertise I’m paying for. I would think they have informal networks of colleagues they bounce ideas off of like any other professional group. In some fields, and I would imagine medicine is similar, the research is way behind the practice. I’ve seen practitioners from all kinds of backgrounds roll their eyes when some hot shot researcher thinks he or she has discovered something that everyone has known all along. (And if they had looked at literature published prior to 1940 may even have found a decent study showing that – but I digress.)
Blogs as anything more than a social outlet that may or may not serve as a type of support group. Yeah, right.
Pax,
MLO
Blog away Doc, if we don’t like it, we’ll say so.
Blogging gives docs the opportunity to show that doctors are real people, with emotions and reactions to all sorts of things.
I have my own ideas about what’s appropriate. I think the main thing to keep in mind is to not drift into the delusion that you can blog anonymously.
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