When a doper discusses a patient or student, is it harmless or a party foul. Let my quickly state that I’m looking for insight here; I’m not criticizing anyone. I also concede that I have never seen a doper mention an actual patient or student name.
On the harmless side, no actual names are being used, teachers and doctors need to vent like everyone else, and, more importantly, teachers often need advice. There is no way to ask for advice without mentioning the scenario involved. On the party foul side, I’m guessing most people don’t want their trip to the doctor or run in with the teacher broadcast to the world, even if names aren’t mentioned.
I bravely sit 100 % on the fence on this one. Anyone got an opinion?
Well, I can tell you that as far as health care goes, there are very very strict laws about exactly what information can and can not be shared with people that don’t need to know it. People working in the field as a rule take these laws very seriously. I’ve never seen a post that violates any of them.
In either case I think that if there is no way to tell the identity of the person there is nothing wrong with it legally or morally. QtM has explained it several times in the past very well. Hell in books and journals doctors talk about their patients all the time and there you have half the information, who the doctor is. Here the doctor and patient are anonymous as well as where they are from. I think the identities are well protected.
I’ve given massages to a couple of fellow Dopers, and, aside from mentioning that I worked on them, and possibly what kind of oil or lotion I use, I wouldn’t give out any details of what kind of health conditions they may have (or not have), or what particular kind of work I did on them. Anything beyond saying, “Yeah, so-and-so is a client of mine” would be a violation of confidentiality.
Also, I’ve talked about actual or almost clients on the boards, but without mentioning their names, and any descriptions of their physical condition and the work I did on them would be general enough that it really wouldn’t be possible to identify the person.
Identifying clients/patients/students by name or giving enough details about their physical description and mode of living that the person could be easily identified would be a serious breach of confidentiality.
There are over 5 billion people in the world, and as long as you do not name names, how is there a breach?
I find the stories from other dopers very educational and interesting. If I was a student or patient of one of our dopers and they discussed me on a message board without naming me personally, how would you know it was actually you they were talking about?
Do you realize how many people in the world have the exact same problems or conditions?
Ex-longtime college prof here. There are several federal laws about privacy in education. Here’s a link to one of the big ones. Note the phrase “any personally identifiable information in education records”.
So I could/can talk about any student as long as the info cannot be “connected” to particular student. E.g., “once a student said X to me during an office visit” is okay. Even “once a student said X to me during a class” is okay since the student was obviously speaking in public (and therefore not having a default assumption of privacy), even though some Doper might be able to figure out where that class was, ask some friends who attended the school, etc. and could figure out who the student was.
So, as long as there is no way on Earth anyone here could possibly figure out what student I was talking about, or that the incident happened in public, it’s in the clear legally.
It’s also in the clear morally as long as other rules aren’t violated. E.g., it didn’t really happen to me and the story was actually published in a still copyrighted form by someone else.
As far as ethics vs. legality, I would also go an extra mile in some cases where I think the person would be upset about talking about something they view as personal, e.g., if they stumbled across it here and recognized themself. But such a situation would be rare enough that I pretty much don’t have to even worry about it.
I don’t see it as a problem. teachers and doctors talk to each other all the time. Like the others have noted, I have never seen anything that even approached the line as to “identifiable personal information.” You can set up a situation and relate information without violating any legal, moral or ethical boundaries.
What are the odds that a patent of yours would post on this Board? Probabaly a Million to one. This Board is here to gather information. The Information is correct 99.9 percent of the time when I read It. You’nsl Gather info when and while you can, we don’t know how much longer we’ll have this oppoitunity and access to knowledge.
I don’t know what a party foul is (I’m guessing breach of etiquette?), but as long as there is no personally identifying information, there’s no issue.
Let’s say Dr.J posts something about one of his patients deliberately shitting on the floor of his hospital room and flinging the crap at the nurses. From the post, you know the patient is male. From this board, you can get a general idea of the location and that he’s a resident. If you dig around and find his website, you can figure out what hospital this happened at, and Dr.J’s first name. I think he’s probably the only resident in the program with that particular very common name, so you could figure out who, exactly he is. So you know that the patient is a man who was admitted to a particular hospital and seen by a particular doctor. All that detective work, and you’ve still got a pool of several hundred people. No harm, no foul.
Now the time he carried on a conversation about my gyno issues via speakerphone at another resident’s house, that was a party foul.
ftg question for you. I understand that school records are confidential so that things like grades and medical conditions like ADD can’t be released. Please clarify discussions of behavior such as, “Joe Smith said something really dumb today”. Is it regulated by law or more of a code of conduct? I know you touched on this but I’m not quite clear.
One more thing, yellowcakesolid, the stuff that **Quadocap ** (how *do * you spell that?) posts is essentially no different than what he would put in medical journals. They do it the same way, only they write as if for MENSA candidates.
Another Prof. checking in, though I will not answer for ftg, I can give a brief synopsis of our ‘code of conduct’ at my institution. First of all, I have broached several topics on these boards about various scenerios with my classes and on occasion with a certain student. Nothing I have mentioned is uniquely identifiable per se, but more of a scenerio discussion. Many times, the scenerios are ones that could occur at any institution across the country, I’m simply looking at views from the teeming millions.
Why I have even had people say things in response to my threads like: “Professor X…is that you???”
While it makes me smile that others find commonalities in my anecdotes, I disguise the information such that nothing identifiable can be deduced to connect someone with my specific situation.
As per the question I quoted above, nothing from any students personal file can be given to anyone, without prior written consent. One caveat would be a summons I suppose. But I think you are confusing the discussion of a students personal file with the discussion of a certain situation that may involve a student. Where as I mentioned above, situations can be similar throughout the country with very separate institutions.
This is similar to what I was going to say. I see no problem with doctors, teachers, public servants, servers, caddies, or anyone else sharing anecdotes about students/patients/customers/whatever. But I do cringe when people post their dirty laundry or personal business and go way beyond TMI. There’s a difference between “My husband made me late for work today <wink wink>” and “My husband shoved me face down on the bed, slathered my butt with marmalade, and licked it off, making me late for work.”
I’m not sure if I made a point here or not. And, no, we don’t keep marmalade in the house.
What the hell? Thanks for getting me to spray muffin crumbs all over my desk. So…umm, do you have any peanut butter?
I’ve read a few medical books (most recently “Complications” by Atul Gawande). His stories are pretty unique but he changes enough of the stories that I’m sure you couldn’t find out who it was (unless they gave permission to him to write about them). I’m sure if HIS book could get published, the few stories told by our resident docs wouldn’t bat an eye.
Of course I’m sure there aren’t THAT many prisoners with misshaped penises out there
Sorry for the poorly defined term. A party foul is something that is frowned upon, a breach of etiquette (thanks CCL), or a social indiscretion. No laws are broken; it’s just something that is frowned upon. Of course frowned upon doesn’t help much either. I think I’ll give up now.
The medical journal is an excellent point that I did not consider.
Ftg and Phlosphr, thanks for the informative explanation of what is acceptable in your workplace.
To be fair, I had posed the particular situation to a fellow medicine resident who was at the time (and probably still is) more up on women’s health than I was. When her partner, a gynecologist, called later, she put her on the speakerphone and raised the subject again. I was a little taken aback, but not as much as I should have been; we residents just get so used to discussing medical issues with one another that it just came naturally. I was wrong, and I have apologized.
I have done a lot of online writing about my exploits as a medical student and resident. I’ve never made a big secret of my identity online, so it would be nothing to figure out who I am and where I work. That said, I always try to change some non-important details about the patients–age, sex, particulars of the disease, etc. I look at every potentially identifying element and see if it could be changed without altering whatever point I was trying to make; conveniently, this allows me to change things for dramatic effect as well.
Now, if the shit-flinging patient mentioned by CCL stumbled onto my web page and read a story about himself, he’d probably be able to figure out that it was him I was writing about*. It’s never come up. If it did, I’d take the story down; I have taken down stories when I thought potential problems might arise, even though odds were remote. I guess when I write my book**, I’ll have to think more about how to deal with that.
Dr. J
Assuming he was coherent enough to read it, which he never was as long as I knew him, and if he were not dead, which he is.
** Tenatively titled Twenty Years of Schoolin’ and They Put You On The Night Shift
