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December 15, 2005
Personal Experience Medblogging Ethics
Head Nurse recently posted her responses to the ten NCCAM site ethics questions about her site. She went on to say that, for purposes of confidentiality, she felt obliged to conceal her identity in order to protect the identity of patients she writes about. I'm completely up front about who I am.
Since Google can identify its users, since IP addresses can be traced, and whois queries can be made, and all sorts of creative cross checking is possible on Google, community sites, and the good old phone book, it seems to me that perfect anonymity on the Web is an unsafe assumption for any blog author. It is essentially self-censorship. The internet perceives censorship as damage and routes around it. So I assume that everything I write can be traced back to me and therefore I modify my content from there. This is sufficient for any number of journals that publish weekly case studies and images in medicine. Those authors are all to happy to have their names associated with those articles. I think I should be proud of what I write, and I think it is incumbent on me to ensure the patient's identity and not start with the false assumption that I myself am anonymous.
Posted by Niels Olson at December 15, 2005 5:14 PM
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