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December 11, 2005

Open Motives in the MedBlogosphere

Dmitriy at healthvoices advised me that Dr Hsien-Hsien Lei recently wrote about the ethics of medical bloggers in which she proposed we should (among other things?) answer these ten questions from The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. I took a very good class at the University of Maryland from Carol Pontzer, an immunologist at NCCAM, and I have to say I think the scientists there are pretty ready to blow the whistle on pseudoscience. We spent a fair part of that class learning to assess the quality of evidence presented in journals. She was passionate about it. So, I'll be happy to answer these questions.

1. Who runs this site? Me
2. Who pays for the site? Me
3. What is the purpose of the site? Genuflection and interaction with everyone else.
4. Where does the information come from? Me and sources I assess to be legitimate.
5. What is the basis of the information? My experiences, my studies, my research, my opinions.
6. How is the information selected? With the trained judgement of a Navy lieutenant, married father of two with a mortgage, and a medical student.
7. How current is the information? I lag the extreme recency bias of the internet.
8. How does the site choose links to other sites? With the same judgement exercised for question 6 above.
9. What information about you does the site collect, and why? My hosting company has lots of site traffic monitoring set up. My main interest is seeing what use I am to the world through the statistics. I've never used the information to chase someone down, though I suppose I could. The only reason I can imagine for doing that would be to make contact with an interesting person.
10. How does the site manage interactions with visitors? I've just recently figured out the commenting module in Movable Type. I now know that before this I was too liberal with trackbacks and too conservative with comments. Anyone can now comment, though I will screen unregistered commentors, and I allow no trackbacks, sorry.

Posted by Niels Olson at December 11, 2005 9:42 PM

Comments

Kudos. All of us in medblogosphere should put hard work into building credibility and trust.

The new media offers many opportunites, but the dangers lurk too and must be addressed honestly.

Posted by: Hippocrates at December 11, 2005 11:17 PM