Rural Doctoring

Brave New Blog

During my recent silence I spent a lot of time thinking about the original vision I had for being a rural family doctor. In this vision, I provided full-time primary care, including inpatient coverage for all my patients, whether they were kids, old people, or laboring women. I was going to be a salt-of-the-earth, old-fashioned family doc who was present for birth, death, and the messy interval between the two. For a brief period--about a year--I lived a close approximation of this vision, and although it was a rewarding and happy time, various factors ultimately led me to transition to full-time hospitalist work.

No, This Blog is NOT Dead

It may have been a while, but I think I'm back in the swing of things. Thank you to all the kind people who reached out to me via email and comments. To put everyone's mind at rest, let me say first that everything is going well with Noo's health and reassure you all that my recent silence was not the result of yet another disaster in my personal or professional life. The usual daily mini-crises continue apace--a tree knocked down into my driveway, an infestation of ants in the pantry, five piles of delinquent charts waiting for me at Macys--but these minor annoyances are a welcome distraction compared to the complete upheaval I experienced last July, when Noo was so desperately ill and I bowed out from a job which I both loved and hated at Gimbels--all in the same week.

Grandma, What Big Teeth You Have

While I've been slogging away in Rural County, making my living by delivering babies and rounding on sick hospital patients, Wellsphere, one of the many direct-to-consumer health information websites, has been quietly building up their business by inviting health care bloggers to post their feeds on their site.  In exchange, bloggers received a nifty logo for their sidebar and precious little else.

A Blogger Takes a Mini-Retirement

Today is the first day of my mini-retirement, and it arrives not a minute too early.  Early this morning, I had to deal with some hospitalist aggro that left me buzzing for the first few hours of my brand-new extended break and reminded me exactly why I need to get some distance from my work.  I've been hard at it for four years and I'm beginning to get too touchy about the interpersonal politics involved in practicing medicine in a small town.  Things happen and get under my skin and stay there for days, and who needs that?

Book Review: The Future of Reputation

Early in his exploration of the nature of privacy and reputation in the Internet era, author Daniel Solove writes the following:

"Ironically, the unconstrained flow of information on the Internet might impede our freedom."

This statement sets the tone and theme for Solove's excellent survey of public self-disclosure and protection of privacy in The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet. Mr. Solove, an associate professor at the George Washington University School of Law, is an expert in Internet privacy issues. In The Future of Reputation, he examines the specific conundrum which occurs when people voluntarily submit details of their personal lives to blogs and social media sites. Once published, such information can take on a life of its own. Mr. Solove cites a number of well-publicized incidents in which personal disclosures have circulated beyond the personal network they were originally intended to entertain:

What is Transparency?

Since posting this on Friday, I've been talking to friends about the risks of blogging with my particular brand of candor. Some are worried I am exposing myself too much on my blog, especially when it comes to my professional life. I worry about this too, but for a different reason.