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.
"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)