Kevin, M.D. is easily the most famous medical blogger on this side of the Atlantic (NHS Blog Doctor is his counterpart in the UK). I was reading his blog for 6 months before I started my own site(s) in 2005, thinking “if Kevin can do it, so can I.” Needless to say, I was wrong. The closest I got to Kevin’s fame was blogging on his site as an invited guest when he was on vacation… :)

This morning, Kevin has an op-ed published on the USA Today website about defensive medicine entitled “Wasted Medical Dollars”:

Defensive medicine is “a phenomenon in which doctors order tests to avoid the threat of a malpractice lawsuit.

At $210 billion annually, defensive medicine is one of the largest contributors to wasteful spending, and it can manifest

in many forms: unnecessary CT scans, MRIs, cardiac testing and hospital admissions. A 2005 survey in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that 93% of doctors reported practicing defensive medicine.”

The medical blogging community is gaining increasing traction and now includes the so-called “official blogs” sponsored by professional organizations such as the American College of Emergency Physicians. Even our CEO here at the Cleveland Clinic has a blog. It looks like the “blog fatigue” has not spread to the medical field yet.

Robert Centor, the immediate past president of SGIM, is another medical blogger who had written an Op-Ed for the USA Today in the past.

References:
Another Milestone: Two Million Page Views for Clinical Cases and Images
“Official” Medical Bloggers
Has Blogging Peaked?
Image source: Kevin, M.D.

Original post by Clinical Cases

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