IdeaLab: ‘Why I Blog’
Most of my patients don’t know it. I am not paid to do it. Yet still, I am addicted to blogging.
By Robert Lamberts, MD I Web log, or blog, for short. For the uninitiated, this means I keep a publicly accessible journal/column/soapbox on the Internet. I blog (mostly) on medical subjects — making me a medical blogger — on a Web site called distractible.org.
I upload, or post, my writings regularly to this Web site. People can read my posts — people anywhere in the world. My blog gets anywhere from 200 to 600 visitors per day. Some blogs get thousands.
As a physician who’s as busy as you are, why would I take time to blog?
I enjoy writing. Until blogging, I hadn’t had much opportunity to write. Now I can write serious pieces on the dysfunctional state of our healthcare system, alongside silly pieces about people being magnetized by MRI scanners. I don’t have to submit my entries to an editor (although sometimes that may be of benefit), and I don’t have deadline anxiety. I write about whatever I want, whenever I want.
I like the attention. I never truly outgrew being a class clown, and so blogging seems so natural. What a heady feeling, knowing that many people are reading what I write and that they’re enjoying it. How do I know this? Because people can comment on my posts. In fact, interaction between the author and readers via the comment section of a blog sometimes produces the most creative content. And, it’s an honor to see your writing cited in other blogs, or even in “traditional” media. (I was cited in The New York Times once. How cool is that?)
