This is what I got as a reply to the eMail I sent:

Hi Moofie,

I wanted to let you know that we have deleted your profile and posts on Wellsphere from your blog at http://moof.blogsplot.net/.

I wondered if you might like to connect with me personally, perhaps with a chat by phone.

Feel free to call me on my cell, XXX XXX-XXXX, or send me your number and a time, and I’ll be happy to call you.

Cheers, Geoff

Geoffrey W. Rutledge MD, PhD
Chief Medical Information Officer
Wellsphere Inc.
Dr.Rutledge@wellsphere.com
(XXX) XXX-XXXX

This was my reply:

Dr. Rutledge, I honestly don’t know what we’d talk about. All of the points I’ve made are true, and have been witnessed and/or experienced by a great many other bloggers.

At first, I just felt cheated after I joined, because you dumped me into parenting – exactly where I told you I didn’t want to be, and where you reassured me that I wouldn’t be. I was writing some pretty dark posts on my blog at the time, and those were being rss’ed into the parenting group! Even when I wrote to tell you about that, I didn’t hear from you. I had to stop blogging on my own blog until I could figure out what to do – those posts were never meant to be fed to a mommy group! I ended up having to manually delete myself from the Parenting group. The deletion worked, but that just dumped me into general medicine.

That’s when things began to be more than just personally disconcerting. Although I have absolutely no medical training or experience, you put a big blue EXP next to my name, and labeled me as a “Health Maven for the General Medicine Community”, and as a “Top Health Blogger.” This was enough to give unwary readers the false idea that I might be able to offer some “general” medical advice. Not only that, but you *encouraged* your “mavens” to answer as many questions as they could so that they could achieve “Top Health Maven” status. All of that with no consistent or official medical oversight! Looking through the questions, most went unanswered … and of those that someone actually did reply to, a great many were answered by people who have absolutely no business “practicing medicine”. At this time, if the answers given to your readers were compiled and researched, I think that some medical board someplace would be completely nonplussed to realize that a large (very large) part of the questions were answered by people who are not legally (or practically) qualified to give medical advice. And you, a physician, allowed (actively encouraged?) it …

I wonder how many people have been seriously hurt by this …

Even before I joined, I was a bit wary of the fact that alternative medicine groups were given equal footing and credibility as the science based medical groups. That shows yet another lack of concern for the well being of people who trusted you.

If you want to talk, I’m willing … but as I said above, I don’t know what more there is to say. Since you have taken the Hippocratic Oath, and receive immediate respect and trust from so many because of the initials after your name, I can only hope that you yourself were duped by someone further up the food chain. But even then, I don’t see how you could have not known what was going on.

Doris “Moof” Ballard
Berwick, ME
All Blogged Up: A Moof’s Tale
(XXX) XXX-XXXX

Anyone else have something to share?

Posted: Friday, January 30th, 2009 at 5:12 pm under: Rants and Ravings, Spammers & Thieves. Comment Feed (RSS 2.0). Interact: Comment.