Jacob has taken a stand on this issue on his own weblog:

With this, he lays to rest the anonymous complainer’s campaign to oust me from Medlogs syndication. Of course, I heartily agree, even though I did not think the complaint was ever really about the relevance of politics to medical practice but rather an attack on my particular political ‘rants’.

If I had fallen for anon.’s ‘troll’ anymore than I did, had I wanted to devote even more indignant energy to my response than I already had, it would have been along exactly the same lines. I would have written about how ridiculous it is to try to separate politics, even very specific anti-Bush and antiwar rhetoric, from healthcare concerns. It is axiomatic that the practice of medicine is embedded inherently in a political and social context, and that is particularly true of mental health care.

Most people, especially these days, fast-track from college right into medical school and then their medical careers. One of the advantages of my taking time to live a life before studying medicine and becoming a doctor was that I brought well-formulated political activist sentiments into the medical sphere. So my credentials around the inherent politicization of the practice of medicine go way back. To wit: during medical school, I became a student leader in Physicians for Social Responsibility, was privileged to be mentored by Robert J. Lifton MD and Helen Caldicott MD, and organized a national conference addressing the nuclear arms race as a public health emergency. (Yes, I studied medicine as well…)

My anonymous complainant will doubtless scoff at all this. In a comment of his/hers which I have since deleted, s/he threatens to “reveal myself” and mount a sympathy campaign for support to exclude my weblog (and, I would surmise, those of others with similar sentiments) from syndication. So we do agree on one thing at least — the advantages of taking the issue public rather than sniping from a position of cowardly anonymity. Nonetheless, I expect this is the end of this matter. I thank FmH’s readers for your patience with this idiocy.

Update: I posted this a week ago and got no responses back from Medlog readers, although there are a few comments here. I am reposting it again to solicit comments for a second week, after which I will consider myself to have discharged my responsibility and will close the matter. The anonymous poster referred to below has continued to post provocative comments here on FmH, which I have begun expunging as I threatened to do if s/he had nothing new to say on the matter. I have still heard nothing from Jacob Reider, the sysop of Medlogs. If you are reading this on Medlogs and have an opinion on this matter, please enter a comment on the copy of this post on FmH, identifying yourself as a Medlogs reader. Please don’t share the complainant’s cowardice by remaining anonymous.

Here’s the repost: For readers of FmH — unless you read the comments under the post to which this link points on my weblog Follow Me Here, you would probably not know that FmH is syndicated at medlogs.com.

For readers via Medlogs — I am posting this largely for you. Recently, an anonymous Medlogs reader, in the midst of a mutually rather acrimonious exchange with me in the comments section of FmH, let me know on FmH that s/he has complained to the sysop of Medlogs about my posts syndicated there. She/he claimed that the problem was the volume of posts with non-medical content originating from FmH; I think the issue is really that s/he does not like my political position. Her/his original derogatory comment on FmH did not even mention any supposed concern about medlogs.com:

Only when pressed about the commenter’s demeanor, and defensive, did s/he mention that s/he felt I was hogging the bandwidth at Medlogs:

You can read the rest of the exchange by scrolling down from here. (Not me at my best…)

(Ironically, this complaint about the volume of my posts and the offensiveness of my politics was in response to an item I had put up on FmH considering the decreasing volume of my posts at this point in my weblogging career. In particular, I am posting less political material, as I explain in the post in terms of “Bush fatigue.”)

But back to the issue at hand. My impression is that medlogs.com is not a weblog for medical posts but rather a weblog syndicating medical webloggers’ posts; as you can see, an important distinction. To my way of thinking, it is a dull medical professional who is interested in nothing but medical content, and most medical professionals I know are interested in a broader range of their colleagues’ thoughts. That’s my notion of the medical community crystallized by medlogs.com. FmH represents a cross-section of the thoughts and interests of a psychiatrist (albeit a leftwing antiwar anti-Bush one); seemed to have a place on Medlogs.

I would imagine that if I was offbase in that respect I would have long since heard from Jacob Reider or other Medlogs readers. The page to add a site to Medlogs says, “We will get to feed requests ASAP.” I take that to mean that Reider reviews sites applying for admission to medlogs.com to see if they are appropriate; for just this reason, it would be a great gamble not to do so. In that case, my content was deemed to be in the acceptable ballpark. In any case, I wrote to Reider about this difference of opinion and asked him to clarify. I told him that, although he might be reluctant to kick me off in response to concerns about my content because the action might have the appearance of political censorship, I offered that I would voluntarily withdraw FmH from Medlogs syndication if he thought it would be the right thing to do . I have yet to hear back from Reider.

I am posting this now because I think it would be responsible of me to solicit other Medlogs’ readers opinions about whether I am sullying their reading experience and whether I should leave Medlogs. Do you share the concerns of the scurrilous, anonymous complainant? Do you find my posts on Medlogs out of place or is the content I add acceptable in light of what you understand Medlog’s raison d’etre to be? I know there is some selection bias in phrasing a question in this manner; I ask sympathetic readers to consider replying as readily as others might do it in antipathy. You can let me know by going to the copy of this post on FmH and entering a comment. Please identify yourself as a Medlogs reader (and don’t share the complainant’s cowardice by remaining anonymous, please). Thank you for your input, and I would be happy to leave Medlogs if the preponderance of opinion supports that. I would be happy to see Anon. eat crow if the preponderance of the evidence supported that outcome… (but I will not hold my breath).