There was a popular article last week discussing how doctors were ignoring evidence and logic because so-called experts in their fields hadn't instructed them what to do yet. They refused to think for themselves.

The idea that a doctor only used this form because an expert told them to, and didn't think about it for even a minute, does not fill me with confidence. Why would this thought process be confined to one area?

Link: http://www.cancer-healing.com/blaylock_brother.php

It's obviously not, you can find any number of books on Amazon about how the standard of care in virtually every area of medicine is horrifically awful. The one thing these books have in common is that virtually none of them are selling more than 10,000 copies, and of course number of physicians that actually read and take the time to read these books and understand them is only a small fraction of that. The vast majority of doctors can't even name a single recent finding in their own field, let alone the most important ones.

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>Alex3917: The vast majority of doctors can't even name a single recent finding in their own field, let alone the most important ones.

I guess what you are saying is that it's important to support one's opinion with peer-reviewed research, rather than being overly reliant on personal experience. A noble goal. I'm assuming that because this is important to you, you have done the same. Could you please cite your sources for the above statement? Or is this an extremely clever way of proving the point that perhaps physicians really are justified in worrying about unfounded negative opinions on the internet?

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Healthcare is in an odd state right now. Technology is being adopted rapidly, regulations are being passed that change how medicine is practiced, patients are getting more involved in their care and the clinical staff is expected to be involved with this while continuing to improve patient care. Eventually all of this change will be for the better, but not everyone handles change well.

If a doctor reads a medical study, takes a risk, and the patient dies anyway then the medical review board will ask them to explain themselves and why they didn't follow procedure.

Physicians are required to provide treatment within the standard of care. I'm not sure if that's the "exact rigid procedure" that you are referring to, but I would note that this requirement is imposed by the legal system.

Also, it really makes me sad to hear that you think that doctors don't care about their patients that die. I am a physician, and I can tell you (anecdotally) that doctors I have known who lose patients don't take it lightly. I'm sure there are exceptions, but I would ask you to back up such a broad and accusatory statement with some evidence.

What's a "bad day at work" like for you?

Perhaps you had a bad experience with a physician, but please don't generalize that to the entire profession. That's a ridiculous, inflammatory starting position.

You don't know anything about being a doctor.

What action should I take to get this clause removed? I don't care if they share the tapes with the police when they have a warrant. I do care if they end up on the Internet. I want to walk to my apartment, not have my life broadcast to strangers.

* 'Anonymously' put up a bunch of papers around your apartment complex to direct residents' attention to those terms in the lease contract.

* Notify the local media about it.

* Discuss the idea that someone could use it to determine when you are/aren't home in order to rob/assault you.

* If you want to fight dirty you could bring up the 'protect the children' angle and talk about online predators watching your children.

Kind of hard, when they have security cameras.

I'm guessing the situation is that networkable cameras have been installed and that they're being accessed remotely by management or a security company they hired.

I'm also actually surprised they even bothered to notify you and have the addendum. It'd be nice if they just said that or offered that as an immediate explanation. But they probably just got boilerplate text designed to be as broad as possible. Nothing necessarily sinister but lazy/cheap.

  > Nothing necessarily sinister but lazy/cheap.

Lazy/cheap is no excuse for attempting to pool as much power in your corner as possible 'just in case.' Once you've gained all of that power 'just for defensive purposes' there is nothing to stop you from using it offensively.

What I'm saying is that there's not necessarily any shady motive behind it. The problem is - and has always been - how to determine this.

How is this copyright clause even helpful in that case? I'm guess it's not.

Although this is probably the best way to let them know, unfortunately real world constraints often mean that there are a very small percentage of people who are in a position to truly have a choice between not renewing their lease (in this example) and renewing it. Therefore, a company who is only being affected by those people who don't like their policy and have a choice to follow through will likely receive very little feedback. This is why, I feel, although on paper it works, in real life unfortunately one must insist on other ways to get our point across, including the ones mentioned in replies to the OP.

For EXAMPLE:

Patient X: This Doctor is terrible, I had a broken leg and he told me to get the hell out of the hospital and walk it off.

Doctor Y: This Patient has been to the ER 30 times over the past 2 months, every time he asks for narcotics for broken bones that NEVER show up on X-rays.

Patient X's Lawyer: You are now being sued for a HIPAA violation.

I could be completely wrong though. You would probably want to A/B test it ;)

At least when I read hotel reviews on tripadvisor I know enough to tell when the one-star reviews are based on real complaints ("Cockroaches all over the room") or excessively picky customers ("Desk clerk rolled his eyes the third time I requested to be shifted to a room with a better view").

But if I read "Doctor Smith botched my surgery, and I lost both my legs" I'm at a loss. Did Doctor Smith really botch the surgery? Or did Doctor Smith's heroic and brilliant surgical intervention just manage save the life of a patient who otherwise would have died? I don't know, and the patient really doesn't know either.

If I knew more about medicine I'd probably have a more realistic example than that, but the fact is that some patients always wind up with outcomes from their medical treatment which are worse than they expected, and they're usually pretty ignorant about to what extent the blame lies with "crappy doctor" vs "crappy luck".

Normalizing reviews is extremely hard, so it's a bit worrying to think about what online reviews might do to doctors' willingness to take on challenging cases.

http://lagunaskincenter.com/RegistrationForms.aspx

I agree to the mutual privacy agreement and authorize the office to retain full copyrights to any communication or online posts related to my treatment and services.

http://www.academylaser.com/user/PatientSignInForms.pdf

This doctor demands a five year gag order on all his patients!

http://www.rejuvalife.md/forms/patientreg09.pdf

This doctor seems to imply he would try to find loopholes in HIPAA to use your records for marketing if not for you agreeing to keep quiet on Yelp.

Are all Dr. Y's reviews positive because Dr. Y is a great doctor, or because Dr. Y removed the negative reviews?

With ownership of the commentary comes the power to remove it.

Since the office owns the full copyright to any communications posted online by the patient, if the patient were to post libelous content, would the doctor then sue his office for libel?

Hopefully more people will become educated on the matter and refuse to be a patient of such physicians and dentists.

Its like they're saying, "Don't rate your doctors, let us do it for you!"

"The agreement is based on a template supplied by an organization called Medical Justice, and similar agreements have been popping up in doctors' offices across the country. As we dug into the story, we began to wonder if Medical Justice was taking advantage of medical professionals' lack of sophistication about the law. Doctors and dentists are understandably worried about damage to their reputations from negative reviews, and medical privacy laws do make it tricky for them to respond when their work is unfairly maligned. Although Dr. Cirka declined repeated requests for an interview, his emailed statements (and the statements of his staff) suggest he doesn't understand the terms of the agreement he asks his patients to sign."

Doctors aren't lawyers. Most just want to stay in business and do their job without getting sued. That's where organizations like Medical Justice come in. Attacking the individual Doctors on an issue like this does no good. Because they weren't the people who thought up the chain of logic that led to the creation of this form. So they can't argue the pros and cons of its existence. Meaning they might agree with every counter point you present but still stick with the agreement because they are "trusting experts"

If Ars or anyone else wants to really make a difference in this arena they need to engage those "experts" and take the accusations to that organization (they clearly tried to do this, my issue is with their attack on the doctor)

The problem with the author calling-out an individual doctor is it makes a case for the agreement. By singling out one doctor and attacking him for an industry practice it says "patients can be irrational online" which will make doctors fear the online world more (and hence give more credence to organizations that claim the best way to deal with patients is to censor them)

I reasonably expect that highly educated doctors should have enough skepticism and worldliness to recognize that there exist people who will try to take advantage of them, much like "Medical Justice" has done here. Demanding that patients sign away their rights to public expression of their opinions is prima facie ridiculous and should trigger the bullshit meter of any doctor I'd consider trusting my treatment to. If doctors' bullshit meters don't trigger there, I shudder to think what pharmaceutical companies and free lunches could sneak by them.

Legally enforceable? Damned if I know.

They're running a business at the end of the day, especially with so many of them arguing against public healthcare options.

A lot of businesses cannot bad mouth customers or defend themselves in public due to how badly it looks to hash out all the details between the parties. If you check out WebHostingTalk.com you will see that sometimes hosting providers and dissatisfied customers will get into multiple page slugfests over who was in the wrong. This just makes the hosting company look unprofessional.

Let's say someone wrote a negative review about a cell phone store: "They wouldn't give me a cell phone! They're a horrible company!". The cell phone store isn't going to reply back(in a public space) "You couldn't get a cell phone because your credit was terrible & when we ran your card for a deposit it came back as declined!". It makes them look bad for airing the customers dirty laundry in public. A generic response & a request for the customer to contact them on the issue is the best they can do in that situation.

These review websites sometime have a feature where the business can become "verified" which allows them to respond back to these posts with at least something generic like "Dr. X has attempted to communicate with Customer Y" or something generic like "I am sorry to hear of your problems, please contact us @ xxx-xxx-xxxx so we can help resolve this matter". This is probably the most any business can do as far as communicating details about a certain customer without looking bad.

If doctors are asking patients to enter into a contract with them, they should have a good understanding of exactly what it says.

https://www.medicaljustice.com/web-defamation-purch1.aspx

The fake patient quote on the page is so bad it's almost funny ...

Maybe EFF could do some SEO efforts to get on google's front page talking about what they really mean to balance everybody trying to sell them.

"I'm a doc. I have no idea of the legality of such "contracts", but it doesn't matter - such a practice is completely unethical.

"Nor is it going to help a physician when a patient makes a complaint to your medical licensing board.

"If you're doing your job as a physician you aren't a "provider" to "consumers" - you are hopefully a professional working in the best interests of a patient or population of patients regardless of your own personal interests - this horseshit obviously has nothing whatsoever to do with that goal."

I don't want my doctor focused on winning internet popularity contests. Most people are not qualified to critique for the general public much more than manner, environment, and particularly egregious mistreatment.

Choosing a doctor can be difficult and it's a problem worth solving, but I don't think online review sites are the best way to do it. (That doesn't make unreasonable terms and conditions any less unreasonable, though).

Sites like www.ratemds.com are encouraging patients to review their doctors like they would review a restaurant or hair salon on Yelp. A collection of customer reviews of a restaurant can be very useful in two ways. First, the main point of a going to a restaurant is the customer experience, which is more or less the same for everyone. If a lot of people are leaving a restaurant happy enough to write a favorable review on yelp, that's pretty a good indicator that you may enjoy the experience as well. Furthermore, many customers are well-qualified to critique the details of the service. The food, environment, atmosphere, busy times, and various other features can be described. For something like a hotel or a hair salon, those feature descriptions will probably be more important. You can look for mismatches between what's advertised and what the customers are saying

Doctors are different from restaurants in a critical way. The point of going to a doctor isn't to feel good about the experience (although hopefully you will) the point of going to a doctor is to get good, personalized, medical care. Ratemds draws focus to the incidental features which are useful but not especially critical (staff, punctuality) and on very vague evaluations of the doctors ("helpfulness" and "knowledgeable"). For the most part, the patients don't do an especially good job of rating the actual medical care.

In terms of surveying patients, all I really want to know is how many are dramatically unsatisfied. Occasionally I hear major complaints about caregivers from multiple people (extremely rude, very painful, etc.). That's about the extent to which I trust the average patient to inform my decision about what doctor is right for me, although I will admit standard Dental care (cleanings, fillings) is more reviewable than internal medicine.

There has been a great deal of focus on the delivery of procedures in health care and not so much on actual cures. Compensation is entirely based on procedures. A doctor may be rated on how a procedure was performed, but only a patient can decide if the result was good.

Perhaps a system that quantified a patient's health before and after an experience is a good way to go or over time is the way to go. If a doctor is able to keep his patients healthier, he's a good doctor. But that's pretty difficult to do with "random" ratings. Which is probably why word of mouth is probably more trusted. And doctors haven't figured out how to stop it.

I could also see that approach making sense in things like automobile repair.

http://www.yelp.com/biz/ken-cirka-dmd-philadelphia-2

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Dr-Ken-Cirka-DMD/142418484400?...

http://philadelphia.doctoroogle.com/reviews/viewdentist.cfm/...

http://www.bbb.org/washington-dc-eastern-pa/business-reviews...