You have been warned, cease and desist with your medical blogs!

I came home for lunch and my wife was reading my CMAJ and showed me this article. I was a little taken back.

Certainly when one is blogging, if you are going to have fun and have a blog that people might actually read, it is necessary to criticize and make fun of individuals and institutions. That is why I remain semi-anonymous and use nick-names. For example I call the institution where I used to work, "The Centre of Excellence". Just about every university town has a "Centre of Excellence". I trained at one.

The article gives the example of an ER resident who vents his frustrations at patients, staff and life on his blog resulting in disciplinary action. It is of course a hypothetical case. This made me wonder for a second why it seems that emergency doctors have so many blogs but then I realized that next to proctologists ER docs have the most interesting and funny cases.

Now a while back I indulged in some gossip about a local physician. Some people might consider this a breach of patient confidentiality and while somebody did in fact breach doctor-patient confidentiality, it was not me. Trust me, I am usually the last person to hear juicy rumours. Also I have never established any doctor patient relationship with the individual. This is extreme rationalization I know, but when the blog police show up, that will be my defence.

I should mention that over the years I have given anaesthetics to or treated my clinic, famous athletes, politicians and other notables. I never even tell me wife who I did (at least not anymore