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Doctors fight online critics

A while back I posted about RateMDs, a website that lets people review doctors in their area. The Wall Street Journal reported this week that, surprise, the medical world is outraged about it and similar sites. Several doctors have complained and filed lawsuits against online critics.

I'll grant that the doctor-ranking sites have their problems. As of now, they suffer from too few user reviews and a lack of proper filtering. RateMDs, for example, doesn't require any kind of registration, so a single person could post hundreds of reviews without catching notice. And someone who does post can't go back and edit it later.

But the assumption that doctors are somehow above public scrutiny needs to die a quick (if painful) death. At a time when doctors are advertising themselves alongside auto repair shops and hairdressers, they can't very well demand less scrutiny than restaurants and rock concerts.