Blogging Medicine
A NextGen Free-Standing Perspective Article
The internet has made available a huge number of resources for the teaching and research of medicine, including online access to many medical journals, extensive archives of interesting medical images, videos of medical procedures, and even contests for diagnosis. The internet is a goldmine for those who want to know more about medicine, about what life as a physician is like, about the opportunities and hurdles that face medicine today.
One amazing new resource is the fast-growing community of online "bloggers" who work in medicine. They give unique windows into the lives of doctors, the workings of hospitals, the thoughts of public health scientists, and even the operations of HMOs. We highlight here a few blogs that would provide a place to start exploring this new element of the medical community.
Although medical students, residents, and practicing physicians are famously busy, a few take time out of their schedules not only to give the world an inside look into their lives, but also to help create a community among practitioners of medicine. Dr. "Sydney Smith", one of the internet's most established blogging physicians, is a family doctor who writes about the physician work-life balance, the latest health news, politics, and health policy. The oddly-named blogborygmi is authored by "Nicholas Genes", a resident in emergency medicine and one of the most popular medical bloggers, whose interests include medicine (of course!), the latest trends, technology, sports, anecdotes, media, and public health. His blog is sprinkled with both whimsy and insight on a life, qualities that have made him one of the most popular medical blogs on the internet. A newer blog is by "Dr. Signout, a medical resident in a US hospital who gives a younger take on the practice of medicine. For a slightly different slant on health care, Effect Measure is a blog run by a group of public health scientists, who explore issues from public health to scientific research to civil liberties.
One of the more exciting aspects of medical blogging is the amplification of rare, unique voices and perspectives. SoloDoc, for example, is a blog about a primary care physician who decided to reorganize his career in an attempt to increase the quality of care for his patients, using a rather new paradigm for medicine that he calls the "Ideal Micro Practice." He now uses his blog not only to recount his stories during the transition, but also to help other doctors through similar transitions.
Another unique perspective is an executive manager who is embracing the internet blogging medium: Paul Levy, President and CEO of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. His blog topics range from advice to medical and academic students to his hospitals attempts to adhere to very strict, self-imposed standards of care. He even has a weekly feature on his blog anwering questions posed directly by students. The blog has been featured in the media for his controversial challenge to other hospitals to make their health care statistics more transparent. Other interesting topics from his blog include reducing colonoscopy misdiagnoses with the latest research on error rates and the unionization of health care workers. For insight into the world of health care from the side of management, Paul Levy's blog is certainly a good place to begin. For those who would like more, another executive blogger with a slightly different angle is Charles Baker, who is the president and CEO of a health insurance company, Harvard Pilgrim Health Care. He offers a glimpse beyond the paperwork to the difficult decisions that go into funding health care.
One great resource for those with less time to explore the vast medical online community is the "blog carnival", a periodic (often weekly) listing of links to some of the best writing that week on a certain topic or theme. Each edition of a blog carnival is hosted by a different blog, which decides (based on reader feedback) what stories to highlight that week. There are many different blog carnivals, each with a focus on articles on a particular topic. One of the longest running is Grand Rounds, for which any topic in medicine is fair game. Pediatric Grand Rounds (the two are not related) is another blog carnival focusing on children's health care. Doctors aren't the only ones with an online community; Change of Shift is a blog carnival highlighting the best of blogging on nurses and nursing.
Many members of the medical community have seized the opportunity to reach out and talk on the internet. This unique medium allows the public to interact with physicians, nurses, executives, students, and researchers in ways that have never before been possible. Perhaps in the future, blogging may be viewed as a merely a fad, but the singular transformation of the way the medical community reaches out and welcomes the public will probably never be lost. 
Eric Suh is Executive Editor for the Next Generation and a member of the Harvard class of 2007.