Proudly Pinoy Blogger, MD

As a newcomer to the blogosphere, I am still amazed by the sheer number of medical doctors who blog. Despite their busy schedules - whether as clinicians, researchers, teachers, or trainees - doctors from all stages in the journey, coming from different parts of the world, take time to distill their lives and thoughts for anonymous readers on the world wide web.

The content of these blogs are as varied as the doctors themselves. While some aim to make lay people more aware of health issues or the latest medical innovations, a good majority of the doctors' blogs I've stumbled upon so far are about their lives as doctors or their attempts to make a life outside of medicine.

Given the sheer number of Filipino bloggers loose on the blogosphere, it comes as no surprise that there are much more than a handful of Filipino doctors who blog. Doc Em Dy of Pulse has done a great job of making a listing of other Pinoy doc bloggers on line. To consolidate this growing Pinoy medical blogger community, Bone MD of The Orthopedic Logbook, has also come up with a project called The Blog Rounds. The Blog Rounds is a blog carnival specifically for Filipino medical bloggers similar to the Grand Rounds started on Blogborygmi almost 3 years ago.

As a doctor who blogs, I know I am biased towards reading blogs written by other doctors. It's always fascinating to see through other colleagues' eyes and discover that underneath all the surface differences, beyond the different medical systems, we have much more in common which each other than we realized. The experiences, the struggles, the frustrations, the rewards - the journey to becoming a doctor - is the same. But more importantly, while it is often not explicitly stated, doctors who blog contribute to demystifying medical life for our non-medical readers and showing the world that, yes - "doctors are human, too."

I think that The Blog Rounds is a great way of fostering a community spirit among Pinoy doctors on-line - wherever they may be. There is much we can learn from each other that we cannot learn from our books or our practice; and, in the same way, each of us, regardless of where we are on our journey, has much to teach. It also welcomes non-medical Pinoy readers into our world and gives our collective voice the chance to be heard.

Fellow Pinoy doctors and health care professionals interested in joining in the fun can read more about how to do this over here. But for this project in particular I am tagging my other Pinoy MD bloggers The Doc Whisperer and Caffeinated Gurl to join in the fun.

Sulat na tayo, mga kapatid!

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Speaking of blog carnivals, I'm very pleased to share that my entry "Anything and Everything" was featured in this week's Grand Rounds hosted at ChronicBabe.com. This week's theme was about New Beginnings, and I felt that experiences as a temporary general practitioner after being an adult internist-in-training for 3 years was just what they were looking for. Many thanks to Jenni for including my post!

Next week's Grand Rounds will be hosted at Canadian Medicine (many thanks to the site owners for the link love and the mention!) and you can read about the guidelines for submission over here.

Readers who enjoy medical related content will definitely enjoy the Grand Rounds, which features posts from medical bloggers from all over the world. If you want to know what medical life is really like, beyond Grey's Anatomy or House, MD, you can find the upcoming schedule and archive for the Grand Rounds blog carnival on Blogborygmi.

Happy reading!