“Don’t google yourself,” is the advice from a Medical Defence Organisation in the Medical Journal of Australia, “because you’ll probably find something that you don’t like.”

That’s fascinating. It’s a bit like screening for cancer in people without symptoms. Sometimes screening tests are abnormal even when there is no cancer. This is more likely to happen when the probability of cancer is low.

The topic of the MJA article was reputation management. So I wonder, if an MDO tells us not to screen our online reputation, does that mean the probability of finding something we don’t like is low? Or is it because we can’t do anything about the unpleasant things we may find?

The same article mentions:

But the past 12 months have seen medical defence organisations (MDOs) experience a sharp rise in concerns about growing online threats to individual doctors’ and practice reputations.

In that case, telling doctors not…