Why every physician should be blogging.

The  Independent Urologist has an excellent post on why you should be blogging as a doctor..

By blogging actively and transparently--in your own name--you can influence the dialogue that already exists and turn it in your own favor. Your blog should be compelling, honest, and well written, and if it meets those criteria, people will find it and link to it. The more posts, the more links, and the higher the google organic ranking. Plus, it's fun, and you'll make friends.

All of your posts should be linked to your own website, if you have one, and--this is key--you must blog in your own name and be proud of what you write.

This way, you can influence the conversation that takes place in cyberspace that is about you.

You really should blog or have your staff blog. If you don't know how, it's actually incredibly easy these days. I recommend the site that I use (Read my review of squarespace here.) It literally only takes about 3 minutes and you're ready to go. If you can use email or word, you can manage this system.

It's also good business. Linking your blog to that static site that you paid to have built might mean that someone can actually find out what you do and offer on the web. (I'm not kidding.) 80% of potential patients are using the internet to research major purchases. Blogging gives these potential patients an opportunity to find you and give you a point of contact and trust building.

Take a look at some of the physician blogs listed on the resource page. You really should be blogging. 

Google Alerts: Track your medpa topics.

Using Google Alerts to keep track of what is being said about you and your clinic or medspa on the net.

 
Want to know what people are saying about you and yours on the web? Use Google Alerts to set up notifications when bloggers write a post about the specific topic in question. This sends an automated email to your inbox every day or once a week as you choose.

If you're running a business then there are people mentioning you on the web in forums or blogs. Google alerts let you keep track of all this information in one place.

Alerts also have the benefit of allowing you to easily stay in touch with the latest posted information about Botox, Thermage, Sona Medspas, DermaDoc (wink) or whatever else you're interested in. I keep about 30 alerts and have them set to notify me weekly. (I find daily notifications unmanageable.)

The trick here is to specify very carefully exactly the information you're wanting to receive.  My alerts include keywords like: Jeff Barson, Medical Spas, Medspas, Medispas... You'll need to think slightly about possible wording if you're looking to get everything but Google will send you every reference that fits.

Review: Squarespace.com

You can find a list of other reviews I have completed and links to the products and resources I use to run my businesses in the Resources Section of this website.

Review: Squarespace.com - Dynamic web sites

Name: SquareSpace
URL: www.squarespace.com
Purpose: Dynamic web sites, blogs, content management for laymen. 

Let me start by saying that my personal experience to date with Squarespace has been 100% satisfactory. I have never had a complaint the system has always done what I wanted it to do. I’ve been blogging for the last four years and have switched all of my blogs from hosting systems like Wordpress or Blogger, and my static sites (I still have one) to squarespace.com.

Your web site is the most important part of your online presence. How it looks. How it acts. And more importantly, how easy it is to change, are of prime importance in making a decision on what kind of system to use.

What are your options?

 

Static Sites:

By far the most common choice are static sites. Of course it's not really by choice, they were simply the only available choice until recently. If you have a site, it's probably static, meaning that it's not easily updatable and you can't to it yourself unless your pretty technically inclined.

Pros: You already have one.
Cons: Hard to build. Expensive. Search engines hate them. No traffic.
Cost: Expensive to build and host.

Blogging Software:

Extremely uncommon for medical businesses in the current market. Wordpress , Blogger, Typepad... these were the first attempts at making dynamic sites that are easily updatable and they work as far as they go. Their somewhat technical and again you'll have to hire someone if you'd like to customize your site and offer more than a standard template. 

Pros: Relatively easy to set up. Inexpensive or free. Search engines love them if regularly updated.
Cons: Hard to customize. Limited function. Still need some tech savvy to implement.
Cost: Cheap. From little to free depending on configuration.

Dynamic Sites:

Squarespace.com is the next generation of content management systems that go far beyond what's previously been available. Squarespace has built a system that takes absolutely no knowledge of html, css, or other geek speak and it's built from the ground up for ease of use. If you can use Word, you can use squarespace.

Pros: Easiest to use and setup. Completely functional with advanced features like built in RSS feeds. You can try it for free.
Cons: None, if you don't mind the price tag.
Cost: About what a static site costs: From $7 to $25 a month.

The Bad.

I always like to get the bad news out of the way so here it is... I used to have here that I couldn't think of anything but I've since stumbled across some shortcomings. Here it is:

Squarespace is not open source so they don't have nearly as many members or or growth as Wordpress has. While it means that squarespace provides detailed support (which is excellent I might ad) it also means that they don't have nearly the footprint or developer time that Wordpress does. So, squarespace does not support at least one of the options that I would like to use on my blog. Text Link Ads uses server side scripts. Since squarespace is hosted, they don't allow you to install server side scripts and so I can't use one of methods I'd like to monetize my traffic. Text Link Ads doesn't offer a scripted solution yet so I'm SOL on this one.

I emailed Anthony about this and he responded that if they felt any platform gained enough of a foothold they would start supporting it. I would expect this negative to resolve itself and I certainly can't consider it as anything but a note but I thought I'd include it since I it is something I would like.

How I found Squarespace.

Back in 1999 I started to need web sites. So I learned how to write and code so I could build them the way I wanted.

As usual I conducted extensive due diligence before deciding to use squarespace. (As a guy the definition of horror is finding out later that there was a better choice I could have made.). I read forums and surfed around the web. I talked to my geek coder friends. I quickly came to realize that squarespace different from everything else available. It was clean, it was customizable, and most of all, it just worked perfectly and had everything I could want and nothing I didn't. The fact that they were charging actually made it an easier decision for me since it convinced me that they were going to make money and actually stay in business, making it easier to get help and service rather than have to research and do everything on my own with a 'free' service.

Now I'm inherently nervous about putting all of my eggs in one basket, so I started a new site in order to test squarespace and find out if it was as good as I hoped. 

To be honest I have very little confidence that squarespace would live up to my expectations. I've been more than pleasantly surprised. In fact, every site but one (Surface Medical Spas) has been built or switched to squarespace. Here's the list:

• Simple Curiosity? - Daily posts to tickle your thinking bone.
  
• Medical Spa MD: Information for physicians in retail medicine.
  
• Nimble Theory: My other business blog about technology startups & angel investing.
• Pony tail Club: My daughters blog about her riding academy and horses.
• Kid Agent: My sisters site as a child agent in Hollywood.
• Studio Salon Suites: A business site.
• Fight Club: A networking blog for entrepreneurs. (Since rolled into Nimble Theory)

There are some others that I've helped my friends set up as well but I don't own them.

Why choose Squarespace over a free blog site?

You can get a blog up and running for free as on Wordpress or Blogger. It's a valid solution and I've done just that in the past. (Squarespace also has a 30 day trial period that's free.) There are a number of things to take into account:

1.  I've found the 'free services' to be something of a misnomer since there is either:
   
   • Significant time involved that could better be spent elsewhere so you're, in effect, paying yourself 50cents an hour.
     
   • You end up having to pay someone to do it for you anyway.
2. Starting at $7 a month squarespace is a steal. In most cases if you're really running a site you're going to be responsible for hosting it anyway. (My virtual server for Surface Medical Spas runs about $49 a month.)
   
   
3. Since Squarespace is a paid service, they offer a host of support features and technical support. Since switching all of the blogs I run to Squarespace I've opened up around 35 support tickets. In every case the problem has been resolved and the tech support has been phenomenal with same day turnaround.
   
   
4. Squarespace comes with some really great features standard:
   
   • Search: Where Google's site search works great, Squarespace blows the doors off.
   • FAQ builder: If you've ever tried to build a FAQ (as I first did here: Medspa FAQ) The new FAQ feature stomps any other solution I've seen.
   • Drag & Drop: Moving stuff around on a whim.
   • RSS: No longer any need to configure your RSS feeds. It's already done.
   • SEO: Snap. Everything is valild and optimized so people can find you.
     
   • Build forms and capture information from your visitors. You've truly got to see this in action to believe it.
     
   • I could go on ad nauseum but here's the Squarespace feature set.

Building a dynamic business site that actually works the way it's supposed to.

If you're building a business site these day's it's easier than every. You no longer need to know HTML or CSS or any geek speak. However, and this is important, building a site that no one goes to is a waste of time. There are literally billions of web pages and your tiny spot on the web had better be easy to find.

Perhaps the biggest benefit of using Squarespace is the ease of use. While I'm writing this on the site, I've got spellcheck and the rest of the editing tools that everyone takes for granted. If my front desk needs to offer a special at a certain location, they just log in and do it... The don't have to call me, get the IT guys involved, or shed a tear. It's so easy that my daughters site at Pony Tail Club is run completely by my wife and daughter who have zero, zilch, nada, snake-eyes, by way of geek training. 

If that isn't the tipping point I don't know what is. 

Medical Blogs: Kevin MD calls it Black Wednesday.

Via Kevin MD: Grim news pervades the medical blogosphere today.

Fat Doctor has announced she is shutting down her blog:

Someone in my department printed out my blog and showed it to my boss. He tells me he didn't read it and won't interfere in what I do with my own time as long as I do a good job at work.

Flea's blog mysteriously vanished. Perhaps not coincidentally, he is in the midst of a malpractice trial.

Last year, Barbados Butterfly was forced to shut her blog after her hospital found out:

Thermage & Medspa MD: What's getting tightened now?

 Thermage actually likes Medical Spa MD enough to buy me a coffee.

Clint Carnell, The VP of Domestic Sales for Thermage and I met for coffee to talk about a number of things, some of which relate to this site. I'd had lunch with Clint previously. Evidently my Thermage rep Chris likes me more than my Botox rep. At least Chris sent me a big hunk of plastic.

Here's a list of parts of the discussion I feel I can divulge.

• Thermage had some internal discussions about whether it was a good idea to approach or contribute to what amounts to a public forum (this blog) but they've decided to give it a trial run at least. I got the feeling that Clint and others at Thermage were willing to try something that's new in the marketplace on their feeling that I would be fair to them. (With the hammering that Dermacare and the other medical spa franchises
  have taken on this site I give Thermage a great deal of credit for that.) I think that out there. If you're a company and don't have a blog you're doing yourself a disservice. There's no better form of constant contact with your target market as long as you're not just publishing the same old lame press releases. There's a paradigm shift in marketing that changes the traditional way that's taught in schools and I think more highly of Thermage that they're willing to engage in it. It speaks highly of the brains running the company.

Chris Anderson has some feeling on business blogs; "the natural voice of the boss is fundamentally incompatible with the voice of the blogger, at least as regards their own company affairs.". But wait, there's still hope. Chris goes on to say "The best business blogs come from the employees, not the bosses. They have more time, and are less prone to marketing gobbledygook and gnomic platitudes. And those kind of blogs are on the rise, not the decline."

• Clint told me that a large number of Thermage's reps now read Medspa MD. I thought there was something going on when the Does Thermage Work Poll received 200 positive votes without any negative votes after it had been neck and neck for weeks. Surprise. Good work guys, but now the Cutera reps (they're here too) will probably start dropping that positive percentage. I'm going to have to block ISP's from tallying more than one vote. Perhaps I'll post a Thermage vs. Titan poll and let them battle it out.
  
  
• Thermage has been trying to track down the producers of the refurbished Thermage tips for a while. I gathered that the refurbished tip guys know this since they're changing PO boxes every couple of weeks. Thermage is going to post to this site their position that the study on reactivating or refurbishing Thermage tips is bogus and that the physician who is credited with authoring the paper doesn't exist. I'll be posting Thermages position on this as soon as they send it to me.
  
  
• Thermage is sitting on a number of new thermage tips until they're sure that all their efficacy problems are behind them. I can see that they don't want a repeat of Thermage's previous problems that caused a backlash among physicians. If they can crack the cellulite conundrum they'll be set.
  
  
• I queried Clint about Thermage and the competition from Cutera's Titan and/or Palomar's fractional IR treatment heads. He was reticent to say anything bad about competitors but it was obvious to me that Thermage really thinks that they've got this modality nailed down. I didn't detect any sweating which is good. The companies that focus on what the competition's doing inevitably wind up fighting the wrong battles. I expect to get hard and fast specifics from Thermage and compare the technology providers side by side. Perhaps a Palomar or Cutera rep will pass this up the food chain and we can get some info from them as well. Different strokes for different folks.
  
  
• Clint's smart and I liked him tremendously. Now that Thermage is a public company they face challenges that they didn't when they were private. If Clint is representative of Thermage's leadership I'm impressed.
  

Peer Review: The dirty little secret of medicine.

Via Rangle MD: The problem with peer review.

Chris Rangle is an Internist practicing in Texas. His blog at Rangle MD is one of the older physician blogs on the web. The block quote below is from a post of his on how peer review works in Americas hospitals.

The majority of the time physician concerns about quality and patient safety are properly addressed without the administration going after the whistleblower but increasingly the system put in place by the 1986 law is being used to silence the messenger. According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette a 2001 report by the University of Baltimore found a serious potential for abuse by the hospital peer review system.

The report found that whistleblower physicians who alienate hospital officials are vulnerable to having their admitting privileges taken away, with devastating effects on their practices. Because the federal Health Care Quality Improvement Act protects peer review panels if they are sued, it also can have the effect of protecting a malicious peer-review group motivated by spite, prejudice or a desire to cripple a competitor's practice, the authors said.

What's more is that these peer review committees tend to operate in their own little worlds being only loosely governed by the hospital's bylaws. They are not courts of law, the committee members usually have no experience with legal procedure, and a such there is the potential for them to become the closest thing to a legalized "Kangaroo Court" in this country as you can get. A physician reader let me know about his own devastating experiences with these committees.

"In these proceedings, it is a trial. But it is unlike any 'trial', you have ever imagined. It is a chapter out of 'Alice in Wonderland'. The emphasis is all on 'procedure'. There is NO due process. There are NO rules of evidence. Hearsay, opinion, rumors, innuendo, and outright lies are completely acceptable as testimony. Truth, facts, and evidence are irrelevant. All that matters is procedure. The board can decide that a physician improperly performed a hysterectomy on a MAN, and it cannot be challenged in court as long as 'proper procedure' was followed in making the determination. I am not kidding. If this were not so serious, it would be hilarious."

Eye of Science: Life in the microcosmic world.

Eye of Science

01. Medical science: skin, lateral cut
Electron microscopy

A section through human skin. The skin layers, from top to bottom, are the stratum corneum (flaky, brown), composed of flattened, dead skin cells that form the surface of the skin.

The dead cells from this layer are continuously being shed and replaced by cells from the living epidermal layer below (red) The lowest layer seen here is the dermis (grey-brown, lower centre), a thick layer of fibrous connective tissue that supports and nourishes the epidermis. In the middle, a sweat gland can be seen. Coloured scanning electron micrograph, Magnification: x50.

Mr. Blind Hog meet Mr. Acorn

From Trench Doc: Best Quote by a Resident - “yeah, that’s it… it was on his t’aint”

Medical illustrations & animations: The inner life of a cell.

The Inner Life of a Cell: Watch the video here.

The Inner Life of a Cell, an eight-minute animation created in NewTek LightWave 3D and Adobe After Effects for Harvard biology students, the animation illustrates unseen molecular mechanisms and the ones they trigger, specifically how white blood cells sense and respond to their surroundings and external stimuli.

Sermo: Physician 'MySpace'.

MySpace for physicians

...challenge or corroborate each others opinions, accelerating the emergence of trends and new insights on medications, devices and treatments. You can then apply the collective knowledge to achieve better outcomes for your patients.