2008/10/18
Actually, we did not have to do much (indeed anything) to bring blogging to Orthopaedia. As you see, this is simply the NEWS section of the personal space.
It would be great if our community members take to blogging. I see two obstacles, both psychological: first, users are going to have to get used to the idea that their own personal pages cannot be edited by anyone else. That is, the blog entry looks like a wiki page, but it isn't. (Maybe we should change the layout for blog pages just to keep that distinction sharp.) The second obstacle is the reluctance to actually speak one's mind in a professional ambit where dissent has not been rewarded. (We could "correct" that problem by allowing anonymous sock puppet posting, but in that case the cure would be worse than the disease.)
Overall, these are not insurmountable obstacles; and the exchange of opinions can be a boon to writer and reader alike.
I just received a notice from the AAOS asking me to once again complete my disclosure form. Of course I did so, but not without rolling my eyes. For one thing, this program simply asks if you get any money at all and ignores the magnitude of the payments one might be receiving. For the average orthopedic surgeon (whose income is by definition average, that is, about $465,000 a year) the payment of a few hundred dollars really is not material. On the other hand, as the Department of Justice Deferred Prosecution Agreement has shown us, some orthopedic surgeons receive in excess of $5 million a year from industry. To me, there is a qualitative difference between 5 hundred and 5 million dollars. The second thing is that this program ignores potential conflicts: it only considers whether you got the money already, and not whether you are doing things in anticipation thereof. Said cynically, one might divide the orthopedic community into two groups – those who get $5 million a year, and those who do not get $5 million a year, but want to.
I read the sports pages as an orthopedic surgeon - one trained in sports medicine to boot. That is, I skip the feature stories, gloss over the box scores, and go right to those little articles describing the injuries. Who broke what? Which doctor was consulted? What information is being withheld? In my crazy world, sports exist as an adjunct to sports medicine, not the other way around.
When I was a kid in New York City in the 70's I was more familiar with the names Dr. James Parkes and Dr. James Nicholas than I was with the names of some of the players they took care of... it wasn't until I got frostbite at a Penn/Cornell football game one late November that I started to think rationally about the dream of growing up to be the president's dog.... I think that was my last game on the sidelines as a team physcian. I miss some of it, but not the tundra that is Ithaca in November.
