"Why Medical Students should keep Blogs"

If I ever mention the word blog to Lucy, she will sign exasperatedly at me and brace herself for some very animated gushing about people she will never meet, or events that are quite remote from our lives. Yes, I know I am slightly obsessed with weblogs and that I have been obsessed with them for a good many years, that is before they were well known and cool. But the below article found on medscape.com (members only, but registration is free) highlights some of the benefits of this occupation called blogging.

A word of warning- American English ahead

---

All across the country this fall, thousands of students are starting medical school or new clerkships. Some are kids fresh out of college, while others are embarking on a second career they've always dreamed about. Still, this diverse group shares some common features:

They're going to be isolated from the life they knew before; maybe they've moved to a new city, or maybe they won't get to call or see family and loved ones as often as they used to.


They are going to experience some powerful things, such as cutting into flesh, delivering a baby, breaking devastating news, or staying awake for ungodly periods of time.


In short, this is a group that should be communicating a lot with others -- stories, perceptions, rants -- at precisely the time when such communication is most difficult.

The solution? I think they all ought to get a blog.

You know -- a Web-log, an online diary. Now, I'm not talking about those vapid MySpace pages full of classroom gossip and party pictures (although medical school provides its share of that, too). But I think the students who sit down for 20 minutes every now and then to record their impressions of the wondrous, challenging experiences they're grappling with will be doing themselves a favor. Frustrated friends and family who haven't heard from their beleaguered med school castaway will take a measure of relief in seeing an updated blog entry, even if it's a gripe about exams written at 3 AM.

But perhaps even more important is that medical student blogs are useful for students themselves. It's therapeutic to record your feelings, to vent frustrations, and to register difficult experiences. This is the kind of activity that makes for a sensitive and caring doctor -- probably the kind of doctor that most beginning students expect to be but forget about somewhere along the line. Blogging can help students remember. It's also instructive because it allows us to chart our progress through the years. On those bleak days of surgery clerkship, it may be encouraging to look back and see how far you've come since the first squeamish posts about anatomy lab.

Finally, blogging can create opportunities and open up frontiers. Beyond the simple scenarios that have helped me -- such as getting the inside scoop on hospitals during residency interview season -- getting involved with the nascent medical blogosphere can help you sift through the Web's educational resources (such as a collection of clinical cases and archived school lectures). It also can inspire student activism or show you what life is like in foreign med schools. Blogging might even open up doors into research.

To put it in med-school parlance, such an activity is "high-yield" and quite possibly "evidence-based,"[1,2] and thus worthy of a medical student's valuable time. Plus, you can't beat the price (blogs are free and easy to set up at sites such as www.blogger.com and www.wordpress.com).

Medical students can take their cues from some of the blogs already out there. Besides Medscape's own cadre of bloggers at The Differential, there are institutional blogs such as the University of Michigan's med school blog and StudentDoctor.net, where some editorial freedom is sacrificed for a potentially larger audience. Some students write mostly for family and friends, while others give updates on much more than medicine.

If there's one unique concern that weighs heavily on medical students, it's privacy -- for their patients, for their colleagues, and for themselves. This may explain in part why med student blogs are less common than, say, graduate or law student blogs. While students in other disciplines are expected to develop public communication skills, future doctors are instructed to keep it in the chart or at the bedside.

But there are plenty of medical bloggers who are HIPAA-compliant. They simply obscure details of patient encounters and keep their own names and affiliations offline (which is relatively easy to do, although there's no guarantee that a blogger still won't be discovered). Other bloggers maintain anonymity, not necessarily for their patients but to protect themselves (the blogger behind Ah Yes, Medical School wouldn't be nearly as funny if his classmates and teachers knew who he was).

Of course, getting your feet wet in medical blogging may seem a little overwhelming. Fortunately, there's Grand Rounds -- which in the hospital means stale bagels and esteemed, boring lecturers, but on the Web means a weekly collection of the best in medical blogging. Each week, a different blogger "hosts" Grand Rounds and displays links to other bloggers' best posts of the week. I have been fortunate to interview many of these bloggers for Medscape's Pre-Rounds series, and I can say that many initially had a skepticism of this new form of communication until the benefits won them over.

Andy Warhol said that, in the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes. While that's not yet proven, it's safe to say that most people will one day have some sort of online presence. I urge medical students to set up that territory now -- for themselves, their careers, their loved ones -- as they undergo some of their most transformative years.