Here's an interesting thing I discovered while glancing over my annual malpractice insurance renewal form (to the tune of $7000). Along with the usual litany of intrusive questions like When did you stop beating your wife? or How many human body parts do you have in your freezer right now? came a new one: Do you have a website?
Fortunately the malpractice slate is clean, although I realize that these days that is as much a matter of luck as anything else. Last year was the first time I had to arrange my own malpractice insurance, having been covered institutionally before that. I don't recall that question last year. Now it appears after Do you communicate with patients by email?
Does hosting a blog make one a higher malpractice risk? If I were "anonymous" it would be easier to lie on the form without being immediately found out, but as there have been instances of anonymous bloggers being unmasked (to put it a tad melodramatically), I could still be risking losing coverage if I answered untruthfully.
As I've suggested before, for many folks blogging is just an extension of other forms of publication. The insurance application does not ask Have you written case reports for academic journals? Is this just because your average patient is much more likely to Google your name than to wander through the university library stacks?
What if I hosted a blog on, say, orchids--would that be somehow more innocuous? Or does the mere fact of a professional's name on a blog--any blog--suggest that he is a loose cannon in some way? Unfiltered by traditional media, he could, any day--in the next ten minutes even--type something so appalling as to invite universal and timeless opprobrium, a great carcass thrown out for the vultures...
3 comments:
You're globally accessible to potentially billions of readers. Having a website is the equivalent of wielding nuclear power-- you have the bomb, so to speak. The potential diffusion of your wisdom/truths/lies/propganda/opinions to the hapless masses could inaugurate the greatest conflagration of mental disorder/order of a magnitude hitherto unseen. You are dangerous, I tell you. A live wire.
You'd better be careful where you fire those shots, because history/evolution has demonstrated painfully well how the masses can turn at the slightest whiff of impropriety. The world is your Salem. The mob rules. There will be blood..and carcasses...and vultures...
....peck, peck, peck...
.....only virtually of course.
But is there any other kind of reality other than virtual? Not anymore. This is your world!
Hell is... being trapped inside your blog.
I don't think you sufficiently thought this through...a good thing you have me to counsel you out of any delusions....away from the darkness, towards the light...
Now $7000 doesn't burn nearly as harsh as it did on first hearing...does it?
Freedom of speech, freedom to litigate, (freedom to remain anonymous)...life is good! God bless America (and the rest of the world).
Okay, it's going to be a weekend marathon of "Dr. Strangelove," over and over. I know I saw that home geiger counter around here somewhere...
Anonymous says "Freedom to remain anonymous". If only. Somewhere along the line in creating a blog or any other website, you generally have to put down your real name -- whether it's with your host, your domain registrar, etc. It's private, certainly, but there's this thing called a "subpoena"... And that's a worst-case scenario. The "best" case is being unmasked by someone who has nothing better to do than to put together various clues (profession, location, gender, age -- don't need much more than that).
Much better to approach the entire idea of blogging -- or posting *anything* on the internet -- with the full knowledge that, even if publicly anonymous, you can and will be held responsible for what you say, in ways you never imagined. Some positive! And some negative. Oh and, it's all archived for posterity...
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