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Healthcare Blogging: Web Traffic And Trends

An interesting blog article from the folks at Compete came to my attention recently. Compete for those who don’t know is a fantastic analytics site to see how ANY website is doing in terms of popularity (number of visitors in a given time period). The basic data is free. For more in depth information, there’s a charge.

For example, for our practice’s website, here is the Compete data I pulled which is pretty accurate based on my own analytics information:

My nearest local competitor in terms of website popularity is the hospital, Fauquier Health System: Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Fauquier ENT Blog*

Reader’s Digest Publishes 50 Secrets That Nurses Won’t Tell You

Reader’s Digest has published an article, “50 Secrets Nurses Won’t Tell You“. The link will take you to the article itself, and Sandy Summers has written a review of the article at The Truth About Nursing.

There are some interesting “secrets” here – and you’ll recognize a few of the names!

Gina from Code Blog is in there, and so is Jo from Head Nurse!

**********

I’ll be the first person to tell you that I am not a perfect person, and not a perfect nurse, but two of these “secrets” really ticked me off.

Royally.

The first one: Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Emergiblog*

Using Social Media To Change The Public’s Perception Of Family Medicine

How should physicians utilize social media in their professional lives? In this video, I was interviewed by Family Practice News at the 2011 American Academy of Family Physicians Annual Scientific Assembly meeting in Orlando. Check out this blog post where there are slides of my presentation at that meeting about social media. (Also FYI, as of this posting, the video above has the most hits of any on the Global Medical News Network channel – Yay!)

Especially for Family Medicine, using social media is very important, in my opinion, to help tell our story. For too long, I believe that we, as a specialty, have let others define who we are. Social media has a chance to change that.

As far as initial use of social media, I advise physicians Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Family Medicine Rocks Blog*

Five Fresh Medical Bloggers

I love finding new physician voices.  Here are a few that I’ve been peeking at over the past couple months.  They’re worth checking out.

Linda Pourmassina.  Linda is an internist in Seattle and one of the finest writers in the medical blogosphere.   You can find her over at Pulsus where she offers commentary on an eclectic mix of medical goodness ranging from social media to the subtleties of patient interaction.  Really good stuff.  Check out The Internet and Delusional Thinking.  Beyond her blog, Linda’s Twitter output is the perfect balance of valuable links and dialog.  Put her in your feed and she’ll bring you good things.

Chris Porter.  Chris is a surgeon who has been writing at On Surgery, Etc. since April.  This guy has an incredible voice and offers rare insight into the experience of the surgeon.  He has a remarkable way of seeing medicine at its most granular level.  When he corrals his narrative in just the right way I expect we may see him on the new release table at Barnes & Noble.  Check out his experience as a surgeon in Guatemala.  And from the narrow column Blogger template to the liberal use of crazy images, his site offers the raw feel of some of the vintage medical bloggers.  His bio reflects the mindset of a next-gen physician: I’m Phoenix-based and world oriented.  How can you resist that? Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at 33 Charts*

Results Of ShrinkRap Blog’s Survey On Attitudes Towards Psychiatry

Aloha from the American Psychiatric Association’s Annual Meeting in Honolulu! The weather is gorgeous here and it’s been a great meeting. Yesterday, I heard Archbishop Desmond Tutu speak, and today, I listened to “Conversations” with Lorraine Bracco–also known as Dr. Melfi from The Sopranos. The beach is nice, too, and Clink has been scuba diving. Should I tell you she just learned to swim this past winter? She is amazing!

In a few hours, we will be giving our workshop, The Accessible Psychiatry Project: The Public Face of Psychiatry in New Media. We are telling the audience that the survey we did was not validated, was not statistically analyzed, and is not real science. Mostly, it was about how cool it is that we can even do this at all (ask questions, interact with readers, have an impact). I thought I’d share the survey results with everyone here. If you took the survey, thank you, again.

702 responses Summary See complete responses Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Shrink Rap*

Latest Interviews

IDEA Labs: Medical Students Take The Lead In Healthcare Innovation

It’s no secret that doctors are disappointed with the way that the U.S. healthcare system is evolving. Most feel helpless about improving their work conditions or solving technical problems in patient care. Fortunately one young medical student was undeterred by the mountain of disappointment carried by his senior clinician mentors…

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How To Be A Successful Patient: Young Doctors Offer Some Advice

I am proud to be a part of the American Resident Project an initiative that promotes the writing of medical students residents and new physicians as they explore ideas for transforming American health care delivery. I recently had the opportunity to interview three of the writing fellows about how to…

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Latest Book Reviews

Book Review: Is Empathy Learned By Faking It Till It’s Real?

I m often asked to do book reviews on my blog and I rarely agree to them. This is because it takes me a long time to read a book and then if I don t enjoy it I figure the author would rather me remain silent than publish my…

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The Spirit Of The Place: Samuel Shem’s New Book May Depress You

When I was in medical school I read Samuel Shem s House Of God as a right of passage. At the time I found it to be a cynical yet eerily accurate portrayal of the underbelly of academic medicine. I gained comfort from its gallows humor and it made me…

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Eat To Save Your Life: Another Half-True Diet Book

I am hesitant to review diet books because they are so often a tangled mess of fact and fiction. Teasing out their truth from falsehood is about as exhausting as delousing a long-haired elementary school student. However after being approached by the authors’ PR agency with the promise of a…

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