Healthcare Blogger Code of Ethics

The next submission to the Healthcare Blogger Gallery is from the blog White Coat Underground — Musings on the intersection of medicine, science, and culture.

Your Name

PalMD

Email

palmd@rationalwiki.com

Name of Blog

White Coat Underground

Website

Description of Blog

Musings on the intersection of medicine, science, and culture.

Describe yourself

I am a practicing internist in Michigan. I spend about half my time with my patients, and the other half teaching.

Favorite Tags

quackery, woo, pseudoscience

Why do you blog?

Why not? I like to inform, and I try to say what others may not. I especially like to “de-bunk” deceptive ideas and practices.

Why should readers read your blog?

They shouldn’t — they should stay away from it, as it contains dangerous ideas.

Favorite Post:

Pertussis

Some of this may be redundant, but I feel a need to distill some of the whooping cough information to get an important point across. Bordetella pertussis, the cause of whooping cough, is a bacteria that only lives in humans. Therefore, if it can be wiped out in humans, like smallpox, we will never see another case. Universal vaccination is the only way to accomplish this.

Read more.

Reader Review:

As luck would have it, as I was making my rounds the other day, I happened to stumble upon a mysterious comment signed with little more than a cryptic, “PalMD.”

The game was afoot.

Throwing caution to the wind, and with little regard for my own safety, I followed the link not knowing what unspeakable horrors I might find. And, as surely you can imagine, I was not disappointed.

Needless to say, I initially found this blog to be quite disturbing. In fact, the more I explored, the more my revulsion grew.

It seems this Dr. PalMD has taken it upon himself to expound on such vile subjects as homeopathy, medicine, vaccines, and even herbal remedies. What’s more, he apparently takes great delight in debunking pseudoscience and quackery. Why he even has the audacity to breach controversial social issues in an open and straightforward manner.

Furthermore, as if the aforementioned was not a sufficient breach of protocol, he does so in the language of the common man. He makes no effort to obscure his ideas in medical speak and/or jargon as any reasonable person would. Why any fool could grasp his meaning and inadvertently be persuaded to critically examine these issues.

Blast it, Man! Now I have yet another valuable resource I will be forced to share with my readers. Is there no end to this madness!

Suffice it to say, I’m afraid that I must concur with the good doctor’s recommendation that you avoid this blog at all costs. Just as I first suspected, it does indeed contain dangerous ideas.

If you fail to heed this warning, you may find yourself compelled to add him to your blogroll thus perpetuating this epidemic of rational thinking.

Dean Moyer, Rebuild Your Back