An interesting case.

University of Virginia third-year medical student Mark Hoofnagle decided to write a blog post about his first-impressions of surgery after the first week of his surgical rotation. Having returned to med school after a 6 year hiatus to earn a doctoral degree in physiology, Dr. Hoofnagle's reactions are candid, however bleary-eyed at almost 5am, and geared towards those in the medical community who normally read his blog. He is certainly enveloped in an audience of nods, encouraged and praised by his commentors. A mere six hours after Hoofnagle published this post, the New York Times' Tara Parker-Pope published her own blog piece paraphrasing Hoofnagle's observations under the title "The Mysteries of Surgeons, Revealed".

Uh-oh.

Both Dr. Hoofnagle and "TPP" were chided for their postings; Hoofnagle for his naive remarks about a wider medical community and Parker-Pope for her misleading title and negative paraphrasing. I had heard that the negative attention via this NYTimes blog posting had led to quite the backlash for Hoofnagle from U.Va., but had nothing to back that up until I read his next posting which begins, "Despite the best attempts of the New York Times Wellness Blog to get me fired, I'm still here and doing fine". He continues,

But the confusion of some individuals over what I was trying to communicate is still my problem, even if I was quoted all out of context. Clearly the biggest issue is the change in audience, my [blog] audience includes a lot of scientists and doctors, and the way I write is somewhat geared to this group. Thus you'll notice in my comments mostly positive responses. . . When the NYT expands my audience to a group of people who don't know my writing, my assumptions or my more egregious stylistic shortcuts, it is not surprising there was some confusion and hurt feelings, not to mention some people with absolutely no sense of humor. This does not mean that there is no problem however, ultimately this is a sign that I need to remember that I am writing in a public arena and need to be more careful with the assumptions I make about my audience on any given day. Rather than clamming up for the next couple of decades until I'm tenured, instead I'm going to use this as an opportunity to broaden the appeal of the blog and help explain to a wider audience what evidence based medicine is, the process of learning it, and why I think medicine the best career in the world. Writing this way will help educate people about medicine and how its practiced, and at the same time improve my knowledge of medicine with the goal of making me a better doctor one day. So, back to basics.

I'm glad the NYTimes jolt helped Hoofnagle consider a larger audience. Being outside the medical profession I found some of his revelations moderately alarming (but not in any way surprising), yet I appreciate his honesty all the same. I consider myself to have a pretty great sense of humor, but despite Parker-Pope's insistence her post was tongue-in-cheek (see comment in bold), I just don't buy it. Sensational title is as sensational does, and she very poorly conveys the nature of Hoofnagle's post. I'm glad there were some readers to keep her in check and I hope the U.Va. med school is smart enough to consider Hoofnagle as a student outside his stumble into the media spotlight.