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KevinMD bannerFunny how a complex cultural discussion can get triggered by something as simple as a coffee mug.

In our work to change healthcare’s beliefs about the patient-clinician relationship, nothing has had greater impact in less time than our post two weeks ago The truth about that “your Googling and my medical degree” mug. In one week it became one of our most-commented posts ever; it has 3,500 Facebook mentions and hundreds of Twitter mentions; we’ve had two follow-up posts here and here; and today, two weeks later, it’s been Don't confuse your google search with my medical degree mugpicked up and cross-posted on KevinMD, the most-read physician blog in the world, with the revised title Googling is a Sign of an Engaged Patient.

Please go engage.

I hope you will go engage in the discussion there, bringing real-world experiences.

Kevin’s blog is sometimes the scene of vitriol and reactionary complaints that boil down to “Why can’t the damned world stay the way it was when I was in medical school??” and plenty of reality-based complaints about the difficulties of being a physician (especially in the US) in an era with more and more constraints, financial and governmental. For some clinicians the reality that patient behaviors are evolving is nothing but another source of bitterness.

But not everyone feels that way, and KevinMD is a site where patients can engage in robust discussion – which we can’t, on physician-only sites.So if you want to have an effective impact on the discussion, dive in, with purpose.

In times of culture change and reality change, what works is to point to true stories, a lot of which we’ve already seen in the 74 comments on the original post. You can cross-post those or add new ones.

 

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