LA Times looks at Journal article on medical blogs

On Monday, the Los Angeles Times covered a study that appeared in a recent medical journal.

The study looked at 271 blogs written by physicians or nurses (in 2006).

Some highlights:

• 42% of the blogs included descriptions of interactions with patients
• 17% included sufficient information for patients to identify their doctors or themselves
• 3 blogs showed recognizable photographic images of patients
• 11.4% of healthcare blogs had postings promoting healthcare products, but few mentioned the author's conflict of interest
• roughly 65% of the blogs are written anonymously

Also worth noting: according to study author Lagu, "bloggers' intentions are mostly good, but it's not clear all are doing enough to protect patients' privacy and to avoid undermining patients' trust in physicians."

We tracked down the study (not linked by the Times):

The Times article also describes a medical blogging phenomenon referred to as Grand Rounds, "a weekly compilation of the Internet's best medical postings." They are "a free-wheeling collection of rants, shop talk, case studies and learned commentary."

Here's the link (which the Times omitted): Grand Rounds.

Also not mentioned in the article: there are similar weekly "best of" blog roundups for many different topics. These are often referred to as blog carnivals.

Several bloggers were mentioned in the LA Times; here's our usual summary table:

						Legend
								Link directly to the blog
??								We haven't had a chance to review

The Times article: