I know medical bloggers who stopped blogging or closed their Twitter accounts for similar reasons to those summarized below:"He says in his final blog post that while he intended the personal blog to be a place where he could talk about ideas, his posts had started to “spark whole conversations that I never intended to start in the first place, conversations that leech precious time and energy while contributing precious little back.”
More related thoughts:
"So many things can go wrong (with social media) if you don’t do it right. You can get stampeded and lose the game. Playing on the sidelines is more appealing.
If you run a hospital and decide to establish a vast living presence on the Web, people will say bad things about your doctors, your nurses, your waiting times in the ER, your food. You’ll have to deal with HIPAA. There’s also a chance that you’ll say something you’ll regret. Playing on the sidelines is more appealing."
On the other hand, consider this:
Duty calls. Image source: Xkcd.com, Creative Commons license.
See a perfect example why you must read medical blogs in this post by a practicing electrophysiologist: The first 4 months of a new era - anticoagulation with dabigatran. You can't find this first-hand real-life experience in any textbook or medical journal.
References:
Twitter Staffer Stops Blogging After Backlash. GigaOM, 2010.
Better to Play It Safe. Phil Baumann, 2010.
