As anyone who reads this blog knows, I am fascinated by the doctor/patient relationship. I have blogged on this subject often, and I have pocast interviews with thoughtful experts on this subject like Carl E. Schneider.
Today brought more evidence that neither doctors nor patients are all that thrilled by the state of the doctor/patient relationship. Techdirt in "Doctors Furious That People Might Criticize Them Online" (http://techdirt.com/articles/20050914/1318205_F.shtml) looks at doctors from the point of view of a veteran of the World Wide Web.
He notes that we physicians are well known late adopters. "Perhaps that's why they've just recently gotten around to discovering that on this world wide web we've all been using, it's possible for people to post their opinions -- including opinions about the treatment they received from doctors." He then notes that some doctors have been suing their patients who post critical comments on the Internet. "These doctors get written up in the Wall Street Journal as trying to hide the complaints, rather than respond to them." He then references the Streisand Effect which refers to the actress's lawsuit trying to remove a picture of her house from the 12,000 photos available on the Internet that documented the entire California coast. By calling attention to her house with her legal action, she made the photo of her house an Internet Hit.
David Kesmodel in "As Angry Patients Vent Online, Doctors Sue to Silence Them" discusses the whole issue of doctors, patients, and the Internet by describing the lawsuit of Dr. William Boothe against his patient Dan Morikawa who was not happy with the results of his Lasik surgery. A settlement included shutting down the Internet sites with the patient criticism.
A spokesman for the American Dental Association said in the article, "My reputation is my stock in trade...To have that shattered potentially (by an Internet posting) is a concern." Predictably the president of the People's Medical Society has a different point of view: "Blogs and personal Web sites are no different than talking over the back fence. Those who read it have to take it with whatever grain of salt you would take, just like a neighbor. It's too bad if doctors are insulted by this."
Although some physicians and dentists are successfully suing to remove negative comments from the Internet, I really believe that this is in the long run a bad strategy to take. It just reinforces the public perception that the providers are less interested in serving their patients than in hiding something. As I have posted in two previous blogs, I regard transparency as a megatrend in the 21st century that cannot be stopped. I would always side on the side of more, not less, transparency.
Some in the medical blogosphere agree that transparency is the way to go. World of Psychology reported on the Wall Street Journal article by commenting: "Doctors have long enjoyed limited policing and certainly very little public information about their reliability and effectiveness. I man, c'mon, it would be unreasonable to assume that all doctors are of the same quality. Some are great, some are mediocre, some are poor. How else can people figure this out, since doctors themselves (and their professional associations) have no reason to provide such useful information to consumers?"
Galen's Log wonders if he should start suing Olive Garden when he has wait to dine on Italian food and links to a Kevin item where lawyers in Australia are suing doctors who make them wait for an appointment.
Which brings me to the last article in my musings today: "'It's All Your Fault': Why Americans Can't Stop Playing the Blame Game." (Wall Street Journal, September 15, 2005). Jeffrey Zaslow in this article writes, "The urge to blame is an innate human impulse dating back a million years or more." "If a group of early humans thought their survival was threatened because a member wasn't carrying his load --hunting, gathering, whatever--they'd point fingers, throw rocks, even commit murder." And now in the 21st century, file a lawsuit instead of murder. I guess that is an improvement of sorts. I guess.
The article makes an interesting point that we blame because we lack the skills to problem-solve. Cathryn Bond Doyle is quoted, "Blame is about the past, and about words. Problem-solving focuses on the future and is about actions."
I believe physicians would do well to look toward the future and think about actions that will allow them to utilize all this new IT and scientific technology to take better care of our patients. The blame game and lawsuits, in my opinion, are a waste of energy when it comes to the doctor/patient relationship.
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