About This Blog

Whitecoat Tales is the nom de blog of a midwestern 3rd4th year medical student. He is far enough in his training as a physician to want to hand out advice to everyone, about everything, but not so far that he has forgotten how to speak english.

In an effort to understand where his patients get their information, he asked around, and discovered the internet.  Specifically he has discovered that his patients trust anything found on the internet more than anything a physician says, especially if someone famous said it. He also learned that your average health/science  writing is great writing, but bad medicine.

Now he’s taking to the streets – er tubes- with this blog, to educate the average person about medicine, and science. Hopefully he’ll attract some real talent to help discuss and explain said medicine and science for the average person. Along the way he’d like to give the audience a behind-the-curtains view of medicine, and to see doctors as real people, instead of demigods, or rich jerks with fancy cars.

He also finds writing in the third person oddly liberating.

My fiance’ recently (and correctly) pointed out that it’s basically impossible to find the best posts on my blog. To at least partially remedy the situation, I’m going to rotate some of my favorite pieces here. I’ll also have some permanent links to feature pieces that I think are worth new readers taking a look at.

 My personal favorites:

• Bittersweet – A story I wrote about my first delivery, perhaps also about life and death, and how doctors cope with those
• My Motivation – After about the millionth denialist called me closed minded, claimed I was a pharma shill, and asked me what my real motivation was, I wrote this brief piece discussing why I do what I do.

Pro-science/Anti-psuedoscience

• Swine flu, and Woo – A response to some deceptive enema expert suggesting enemas as a cure to swine flu.
• Why do good people use bad medicines?  – A lay person translation of a journal article that discusses a possible explanation of the attraction of bad medicine.

Hard Conversations

Technically these posts fall under pro-science/anti-pseudoscience as well. I’d like to consider Hard Conversations (eventually) my flagship series. The vision is multipart series discussing a particular pseudoscientific belief in detail. In these series we will be discussing the actual evidence, and contrasting the evidence to the demagoguery used by denialists to confuse people. I’m aiming these posts at average people, who haven’t made up their minds on the subjects at hand.

Hard conversations I: Vaccines and Autism

• HC:Vaccines and Autism part 1: Our introduction to the series.
• HC:Vaccines and Autism part 2: An initial discussion of the evidence.
• HC:Vaccines and Autism part 3: A breakdown of the (debunked) “Vaccine Overload” hypothesis.
• HC:Vaccines and Autism part 4: A fisking of Dr Healy, a doctor who should know MUCH better. Also the first in my (eventually) ongoing  shamings of doctors who should know better.

This page was last updated on 5/25/09.