Poetic Justice

A week or two ago, NPR did a story about medical bloggers.

Part of the story involved an interview with Dr. Deborah Peel, a self-proclaimed national patient privacy rights expert. Dr. Peel stated that physicians who are unhappy with the patients whom they “are supposed to be serving and taking care of … probably need therapy.” She also stated that physicians who vent their “frustrations” with patients on a public blog are “very inappropriate and unprofessional.”

Although I don’t think her quote was directed at any bloggers personally, she ticked me off enough that I responded to her comment in this post. Then, on a whim, I started using her name as a pseudonym for all of the imaginary patients I discuss.

Since then, the whole Deborah Peel/Jane Doe pseudonym thing has taken a life of its own. One loyal reader of this blog started visiting other blogs, making comments, using the pseudonym Deborah Peel, and linking back to my “I am a Professional” post. Please don’t continue doing this, because I don’t want other sites to get ticked off at me for things other people are writing.

The end result is that now when anyone does a Google search for “Deborah Peel” they will see the NPR article #6 on the list and will see one of the posts from this blog as #27.

And … if you do a search for “Deborah Peel blog,” on Google, my blog comes up ranked up #5 while Deborah Peel’s own blog is ranked #11.

Priceless.