1 Boring Old Man

I’ve used this blog to talk about  different topics over the years – most recently to protest what I consider to be the inappropriate intrusion of non-medical interests into my specialty of psychiatry. Writing is my way of exploring things, and I’ve learned a lot that I sometimes wish I didn’t know researching what’s happened over the last few decades. What I write is usually based on some kind of data which I reference or summarize to give a reader, and myself, a basis to evaluate the topic at hand.

I make no claim to be an expert on the things I write about, including neuroscience. If I were, I’d be writing somewhere else. My knowledge of psychopharmacology is practical rather than detailed. In fact that’s one of my main complaints. The medical literature that practitioners traditionally counted on is now too contaminated to trust. A lot of things have gotten off the track in psychiatry, and I want to help find out how that happened. And there are plenty of complaints about the field other that the ones I address – some valid and some not. This is not an open forum for that discussion. There are bloggers who do answer general questions or engage arguments, and  others who use a blog as a form of social media like facebook or twitter. Those are all choices to make, but they’re not mine.

I’ve played with the blogging software and looked into the various suggestions people have sent me. I’m not much of a policy wonk by nature, but here’s what I’m going to do. In the past, I’ve moderated comments from new addresses only. Once approved, subsequent comments were automatically posted. I see that I can’t do that anymore and need to moderate all comments. Appropriate, non-contentiously written comments that relate to the topic will appear with a variable lag-time. Contentious comments will be sent to the spam filter without posting, and the address will thereafter be blocked automatically. I can make this change without having to change my blogging software, so it seems a reasonable way to proceed.

I know lots of blogs do this, but I’ve never had to. I needed to decide if it’s something I actually wanted to do. It might seem a small thing, but it didn’t feel like that to me. I think I might have learned a little something in the process of thinking about it. As a young physician, it never occurred to me the question the medical literature’s ethics, only the science. I didn’t read who financed studies, or look for a conflict of interest declaration,  or check out "editorial support." I assumed that "peer reviewed" journal meant that what I was reading was on the up and up.