Dr. A Show 71: Dr. Gwenn, Dr. V, and Wellsphere

Thursday, January 29th, 2009 at 9pm Eastern Time (0200 GMT)

Join us for a very important Doctor Anonymous Show. Our special guest co-host will be Dr. Gwenn from the website Pediatrics Now. Our guest will be Dr. V and his blog is called "Parenting Solved: Compelling commentary on parenting and child health." He is also the author of the book "Colic Solved: The Essential Guide to Infant Reflux and the Care of Your Crying, Difficult-to-Soothe Baby." (I also invite you to check out the video above)

During the second part of the show, we'll be discussing the recent acquisition of Wellsphere which occured this week. Dr. Val wrote an article entitled, "How The Health Blogosphere Was Scammed." In addition, twitter has had a lot of discussion on this. You can follow the discussion with the label #wellsphere. Much of the discussion surrounds medical bloggers submitting blog posts and other content to wellsphere without receiving any compensation while this company did.

The frustration out there in new media medicine (ie-medical blogsosphere) is palpable. This is clearly exhibited by the screen shot below from our friend Kerri Morrone Sparling who - formerly - had content on the Wellsphere site. (Of note, the screen shot below was taken before her account was deleted) In turn, other people who used to have content on the site have changed their profiles similarly.

Do you have a Wellsphere story to share? To try to get the word out to more people, I encourage you to write a blog post about it and tell your readers, your colleagues, and everyone else about this story. If you leave a link here, I'll try to gather all the stories on this blog post to let people know that this has affected a lot of people - and a lot of people out there are very mad.

I also invite you to join us for the live internet radio show which will be Thursday, January 29th, 2009 at 9pm Eastern Time on BlogTalkRadio. Even if you cannot join the show live, you can always listen later, because the show is archived on a podcast. (Update: Check out posts written by Dr. Rob called "All is Not Well(Sphere)," Chronic Babe called "About the whole Wellsphere debacle," Staticnrg has an interesting logo, and hopefully more posts on this topic.)

If you do listen live, you can even take part in the chat room. It is truly "The show within the show." You can even call in and say hello. A great opportunity to interact with medbloggers you've only read about. And, you will be able to see me on the live webcam during the show!

For first time Blog Talk Radio listeners:
*Although it is not required to listen to the show, I encourage you to register on the BlogTalkRadio site prior to the show. I think it will make the process easier.

*To get to my show site, click here. As show time gets closer, keep hitting "refresh" on your browser until you see the "Play/Chat" button. Then, of course, press the "Play/Chat" button.

*You can also participate in the live chat room before, during, and after the show. Look for the green "Chat Now" button. If you are registered with the BTR site, your registered name and picture will appear in the chat room.

*You can also call into the show. The number is on my show site. If you have a headset microphone, you can "call" into the show by looking for the "Click To Talk" button at the top of the chat box to try out the BTR VoIP option. Hope these tips are helpful!

Update: There have been some questions with regard to show 71. I will try to address some of them here. I did talk a little about the situation on show 72. So, I encourage you to listen to the latter part of that show. As I stated there, I do not intend to release the second part of the show. Sorry for the inconvenience.

As far as the first part of the show, in the near future, I do intend to release the portion of the show with Doctor V from the blog "Parenting Solved" and author of the book "Colic Solved." That segment of the show also featured Dr. Gwenn from the website "Pediatrics Now."