Earlier this week I had the opportunity to host med-blog Grand Rounds. This honor — or assignment, depending on your perspective — came just in time for the new academic year.
(That would be today, July 10, 2010 – welcome new students! and interns! and “mature” doctors without supervision!)
Coincidentally, or not, over the past year I’ve made it my business to study what some might call on-line medicine. Since completing my J-School (that would be J for journalism, just to be clear) degree, I’ve spent much of my time reading, clicking and otherwise navigating through the medical blogosphere and greater Web.
So far I’ve tried to examine what’s out there – websites, on-line newspapers, magazines, blogs, advertisements, academic medical journals, Twitter, videos and more – as best I can, to understand how people find and share information having to do with health. What I’ve learned, largely confirming what I thought previously, is that the Internet as a source of medical information is a complex, evolving, powerful and largely unregulated instrument.
Some key questions for the future:
1. What is a blog and how might that be distinguished from, say, a website with ads and text, or from a newspaper or multimedia conglomerate with an engaging on-line section?
2. How might a reader identify a medical blog or health-related website? Is there a reason to separate these kinds of Internet domains from those concentrating on wellness, health care delivery, science, ethics or policy issues?
3. How much value, if any, should we assign to articles for which the author is unknown?
4. The issue of conflict of interest (COI) is slowly working its way into academic medical journals and continuing medical education programs for physicians. But on-line there’s essentially no regulation and it would be hard to implement any disclosure requirements even if there were. How the public might be informed of COI regarding on-line content – whether that’s provided by individual bloggers, newspaper-employed journalists, med-tech companies or pharmaceutical corporations — seems a critical issue for the future.
Any thoughts?
You raise some excellent points about blogging and “Healthcare 2.0″ in general.
I see blogs as more personal and transparent than news reporting, although when I discuss something that’s been in the news on my blog, I always cite the source (maybe because that’s I’m a j-school grad and believe in attribution). With regard to what makes blogs different from news outlets with an engaging online section, the New York Times does both really well. They have one of the best cancer bloggers bar none in Dana Jennings, a brilliant and graceful writer who blogs about his experience with prostate cancer.
With regard to how much credibility we should give to articles with unknown authors, I vote zero.
And with regard to COI, the FTC has put bloggers on notice that they have to disclose whether they’ve received free products in exchange for a review. I’m not sure how that would carry over to affiliations with pharmeceutical companies (as one example), but I believe any such affiliations need to be transparent.
As a bit of a side note, I’m not sure what I think of the FTC ruling. I used to write for a (print) trade publication where we reviewed computer products. We never came out and said,“Company X sent us this software to review.” We figured that was implied. We spent a fair amount of time on the phone with companies when they weren’t thrilled about our reviews. But that’s the price you pay when you ask for an independent review. I think if a blogger indiscriminately praises everything, people will seek out someone who thinks more independently.