In the city or in the countryside, doctors are embarking on writing blogs. A way, with these online newspapers, to tell about their daily life and to escape it.
“New mission in sight. I’m leaving Sunday noon for Naples. I spend the evening there, I will have time to eat real pasta. I leave Monday morning with an old man who has leukemia, to bring him by plane, in a stretcher, to Brussels. This time, it will be an ambulance on the tarmac to the plane, stretcher mounted directly on the plane, etc. “.
On his blog entitled “the tribulations of a (small) red-haired emergency physician”, Zecclar, recounts day by day, even hour by hour, his adventures as a young professional in medical repatriation. Photos (of the landscape and of himself) and videos The formula apparently pleases, judging by the enthusiastic comments of Internet users to each of his posts.
Less exotic but just as informative, thehe online journal of Dr Vincent describes the daily life and the “moods”, says its creator, of a country doctor. Extract from an article from November 2007: “One of my patients is hospitalized for at least three months for a major problem with a prosthesis. This is why I was very surprised when the wife arrived to renew her husband’s prescription: “Doctor, the doctors at the hospital are surgeons, so they don’t renew the prescription for the drugs. from the heart! “So I found myself writing a prescription to a guy I didn’t consult and, the patient being aware of the absurdity of the situation, pushed logic to the end by setting me up for the consultation! “.
Other general practitioner, similar concerns but different tone. In a post entitled “Autopsy of an ordinary consultation”, Thierry Lecoquierre, alias Dr Coq describes without taboos the beginning of a difficult day. “11:00 am sharp, I open the door to the waiting room for the 10:15 am consultation, delayed by a tough medical visitor but above all by a complicated consultation where I had to tell a patient who spoke poor French that ‘he was a carrier of the AIDS virus, a virus unearthed during a compulsory systematic examination on behalf of OFPRA, he writes. The 10:30 a.m. patient is moaning, he has to do his shopping: he’s a sinister, low-brow, messy, garlic-smelling idiot, who can’t help pointing out that he would wait less if he was. foreigner ! »… The rest of this ordinary but visibly trying day is to match.
At first glance, the style may seem abrupt, but the caveat at the top of the home page softens the point.
“Make no mistake about it. Even if a playful tone is used, I deal in this blog with difficult subjects: those of general medicine, that is to say everything that touches the reality of humans, writes Dr Coq. As the rifle takes hold of laughter to face the unbearable, I seek reason through derision. I use verbal caricature to try to reach territories that conformism does not know. I hope that my impertinence will become relevant ”.
Three examples among others. Established for a long time or still students, general practitioners or specialists, liberal or hospital, like other health professionals, doctors do not escape the planetary madness of online newspapers. Admittedly, in view of the some 5 million blogs created in France (according to a survey by Médiamétrie dated June 2007), the sixty “doc-blogs” – listed on the site medecine2.0 seem very modest. “There are hundreds of medical sites, but the number of individual practitioners’ blogs is quite limited,” confirms Gaétan Kerdelhué from the CISMeF team (catalog and index of French-speaking medical sites), from the Rouen University Hospital, which participated in the creation. of the site medecine.2.0.
But doctor bloggers are, in any case for some, particularly active, and their sites, enriched daily or almost, are very popular.
The blogdupetitdocteur thus receives 300 to 500 visits per day, according to its enthusiastic creator, Dr Guillaume Lardéchois (listen to opposite). Same success for grangeblanche, the blog of Lawrence Passmore, nickname of a thirty-something specialist in cardiovascular medicine, practicing in the Lyon region.
The blog as a speaker
Medical or public health information, rants (on medical visitors, Social Security, etc.), annoyance at the lack of embarrassment of certain patients, but also dismay in the face of serious illness, misery and death … In their often anonymous journal, doctors do not hesitate to drop the mask. “We tell about situations that we are confronted with and about which it is not easy to talk to your spouse or friends,” notes Guillaume Lardéchois. A way to break a certain loneliness, then. But the blog is not just an outlet. You just have to see the diversity of the subjects covered: politics, culture … “I try to re-read the news. In fact, we are citizens with a stetho around their necks, ”continues this general practitioner.
“The blog is a loudspeaker, it allows me to broach subjects that are close to my heart,” adds Lawrence Passmore. Right now, for example, I’m interested in micro credit, so I’m talking about it on grangeblanche ”. Indeed, on December 5, he devotes a very detailed article to the kiva.org site, which allows citizens to lend money to entrepreneurs of all stripes and all geographic origins. Passionate about this new activity (he writes every day), Lawrence Passmore sees it as a second life, the opportunity for unexpected and enriching (virtual) encounters. This is how he is in regular contact with other doctor bloggers (who in fact seem to form a sort of “community”, each referencing at least ten colleagues’ sites in his favorite blogs). There are also the exchanges, sometimes fascinating with those, faithful or not of the blog, who post their comments on the subjects of the day.
If a few well-known docbloggers, such as Christian Lehmann write under their real name, most prefer to use a nickname. A discretion that allows not to distort relationships with their patients, they say, and to have freer speech, without fear of being called to order by discontented people. “We must remain respectful of colleagues and the sick, they must not be recognized”, insists Lawrence Passmore. Failing to respect these ethical obligations, some doctors and students would have been forced to close their blogs, their hierarchy and colleagues having hardly appreciated the criticism in broad daylight.
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