Baggage Check: Health Care Characters

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Dr. Andrea Bonior dives into the world of psychology.

WOULD YOU FEEL as comfortable with the person who's performing your eye surgery if you knew he or she had a love affair with Coors Light?

Would you want to know if the person analyzing your bloodwork — and telling you whether or not your low sex drive is indicative of a hormonal problem — seems to think of women primarily as sex objects?

A new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association explores the modern and uncharted territory of physicians letting too much hang out online.

What are appropriate boundaries and safeguards to enact when it comes to the distinction between personal and private lives?

Most troubling, the question seems to have not made its way into most medical school curricula: the majority of institutions who participated in the survey, while acknowledging problems that have arisen with their students' online identities, do not have formal policies in place that govern online conduct.

Does this mean that the character of doctors is any different now than it's been before?

Of course not.

Health care providers — I'll be the first to admit — were human before, and are human now.

And there are even some bad apples in the bunch.

But most likely, the only thing that's changed is how easy it is, as patients, to find out all sorts of these foibles with the click of a mouse, and how tempting it is for physicians to expose them.

As Dr. Katherine C. Chretian, a local physician who co-authored the study, points out, that's a problem that should no longer be ignored.