Top 5 Cardiology Blogs... Sort Of
A little poking around on the Internets confirmed that quite a few good-to-very-good blogs run by cardiologists have gone dark in the last year or so.
I was going to compile a list of the top 5 cardiology blogs, but when I started going through my favorite blogs and clicking on other sites’ blogrolls, I realized that blogs written by cardiologists seem to be a relatively rare species in the physician blog menagerie. Why that should be I haven’t the slightest idea. (And why is it that, according to my completely unscientific and ill-informed estimation, there seems to be such a disproportionate number of blogs written by emergency physicians? Is it because they have the most interesting stories? Discuss.)
A little poking around on the Internets confirmed that quite a few good-to-very-good blogs run by cardiologists have gone dark in the last year or so, including Dr. Goodheart and Cardiology Note.
Anyway, here are two of my favorite blogs that happen to be written by cardiologists. If you take the time to visit them, they’ll quickly become your favorites, too. I apologize in advance to all the fine blogs I left off of this list and would love to hear from readers about other worthy cardio blogs I neglected to mention (send an e-mail to tkunkler@mdng.com).
Created by Westby G. Fisher, MD, a board-certified internist, cardiologist, and cardiac electrophysicist, this is one of the best-known physician-authored blogs. It has all the hallmarks of a successful blog: regular posts; interesting and insightful commentary from the author; and just enough input from commenters to keep the dialog going. Recent posts have discussed the microeconomics of medical practice, hospital quality measures, and the 8th installment in the “EKG du jour” series of case studies (Dr. Wes describes a patient’s complaints and history, some supplementary information, and the patient’s EKG, and then asks readers to make a diagnosis and describe the next steps they would take). But the standout post has got to be the one that linked to Extormity.com, a biting and note-perfect satire of an EMR company site that informs visitors that “At the confluence of extortion and conformity lies Extormity, the electronic health records mega-corporation dedicated to offering highly proprietary, difficult to customize and prohibitively expensive healthcare IT solutions. Our flagship product, the Extormity EMR Software Suite, was recently voted “Most Complex” by readers of a leading healthcare industry publication.” Good stuff.
Although not technically a “cardiology” blog per se, this blog is written by retired clinical cardiologist and researcher Richard N. Fogoros, MD, whose writings are enjoyed so much by us at MDNG that we asked him to contribute an article to our April issue. Dr. Rich’s long, detailed, and incisive posts on healthcare and healthcare policy (more like mini-essays, really) reward close reading and are regularly picked up for discussion on other healthcare blogs. Recent standouts include “Why Big Health Insurance Supports the Democrats”; “More Fun with Guidelines”, wherein he discusses his theory of “guideline anarchy” and the reasons why it exists; and “Debating Malpractice Reform”, a lively response to DB’s Med Rants proprietor Dr. Robert Centor’s response to Dr. Rich’s post "Covert Rationing Makes Malpractice Reform a Bad Idea."
