A Doctor’s Free Speech: When is It Unprofessional?

Medpundit today has brought to the visitors attention an article in the Detroit Free Press Freep.com website titled “Is Dr. Blogger telling too much?” It deals with the blogger physicians getting close to not abiding with the federal government’s Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) regarding patient confidentiality or emptying crude and graphic descriptions of patients onto their visitors. This all might be called “free speech” but we must decide whether it is beneficial for the public to read that stuff. Is it good to have blogger physicians tell the public exactly what they think and feel about their patients so we can all see that they are human and can have concerns, biases or wild thoughts about their patients. Or on the other hand should these expressions of the physician’s thoughts be considered bad and unprofessional, actually hurting the entire medical profession? Read the story in both Medpundit and Freep.com and then tell us here what you think. ..Maurice.