And in a sign that blogs may increasingly become a means of indirect marketing by pharmaceutical and device makers, 11.4% had postings promoting healthcare products. Few, however, said anything about an author's conflict of interest.
Medical blogs are the place to eavesdrop on what doctors and nurses are talking about in break rooms and at conferences and to read what medical professionals think about the latest clinical studies or healthcare proposals making headlines. For a growing number of the nation's more than 700,000 physicians and 2.9 million nurses, they are a gathering place like no other.
Here, members of the community jettison the facade of clinical authority; abandon forbearance with obstinate or demanding patients; and flout the convention of paying homage to the profession's most senior practitioners.
"Like everything else on the Internet, it's just kind of the Wild West," says Dr. Allen Roberts, an emergency room doctor from Fort Worth who is better known in the blogosphere as the author of the GruntDoc blog. "It's very leveling . . . you can write in print what you would never say to a surgeon's face about him being an overweening jerk."
Though many medblogs are filled with clinical observations and links to studies, some posts are deeply personal and often downright ribald.
In a recent Friday night posting on the blog Ob/Gyn Kenobi, an obstetrician who identifies herself as Dr. Whoo admonished pregnant patients -- under the heading "Seriously, people . . ." -- not to place an emergency call to the doctor if they had just had sex and had a creamy discharge (but no pain or bleeding) afterward.
"It is semen, you rocket scientist, and we really, really did not need to know that," she fumed on the blog. "Think before you page," forcing doctors to take time away from family and home "to hear about the effluent from your nether regions after your feelgood Friday night."
A growing number of people -- by no means all of them medical professionals -- seem to enjoy reading the unfiltered candor of a profession long hidden behind the white coat and forbidding air of authority.
"It really gives a glimpse behind the medical curtain that otherwise the general public wouldn't see," says Dr. Kevin Pho, an internal medicine specialist in Nashua, N.H., and author of the widely respected blog Kevin, M.D. "Some of the opinions are very raw and in some cases don't reflect on the profession in a very positive way. But they do reflect reality; we often say what people don't like to hear."
