The Toulmin Method: Medical students reckless on Internet, sometimes at patients' expense

For my first attempt at the Toulmin method of analyzing arguments I have chosen to write about, "Medical students reckless on Internet, sometimes at patients' expense." This article is written on CNN.com by Denise Mann, a freelance health writer in New York City. The article does not appear to be biased, but rather argues in favor of medical schools taking action against their students unprofessional behavior on the internet. The author claims that there are rising incidents of unprotected patient privacy and that institutions need to adapt and enforce policies about the internet. Her claim is absolute. There are no qualifiers of any sort, the action needs to take place or patients are put at risk, no exceptions. In the authors opinion, it is just a matter of fact.

The author' first reason is that a survey indicates that the rise of blogging and sites like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are opportunities in which medical school students could easily post content that would violate patients privacy. This reason seems relevant to the authors claim because it is true, these internet sites are frequently used by medical students as places to talk about their experiences and communicate with friends. In the process it is very likely for them to accidentally violate a patients privacy, and would be a good reason for the increased incidences of unprotected patients privacy. The evidence in support of this reason is a statistical figure that 60 percent of medical schools have indeed had students post inappropriate things on the web, mostly in regard to the students inapporpriate behaviors.

The author's next reason in support of her claim is that 13 percent of medical schools in just the past year alone have reported incidents of patient privacy violations. This is exactly why she claims that something must be done to stop this. Her evidence is that students blogged with enough detail to identify patients and in some cases were discovered and called out by the families of the patients themselves, placing the school and medical students responsible at fault.

Her next reason supports the second half of her claim, that not only are incidents violating patient privacy increasing, but that something needs to be done about it. She states that less than half of the current schools have any sort of policy in place to enforce means to stop this type of behavior from continuing. This reason is relevant because it shows that there is room for improvement and implementations should be created to in every school. Her evidence in support of this reason comes from an anonymous survey sent to the 130 AAMC Medical Schools. 78 percent of the schools reported having an incident and of those 30 gave informal warnings and three students were expelled. This evidence proves that while some schools are taking action, others who are experiencing problems are not.

Mann's next reason is that although other professions are experiencing similar issues with the online behavior of their students, it is especially important for policies to be enacted for medical school students because of the exemplary role they play in society and their high moral standard, but most importantly because of the patient privacy that they must maintain. This is a relevant reason to the authors claim, because the issue to enforce policies protecting patients from the misuse of the internet by medical school students would not be a question of concern if this were not the case. She provides several quotations from important doctors as evidence for this reason. Arthur Caplan, director of UPENN center of bioethics thinks students need to be educated and violates should be punished, he does not think the behavior should be tolerated and strict policies should be implemented to enforce restriction of inappropriate online behavior. Dr. Jordan Cohen, a professor of medicine at George Washington, and former president of AAMC believes action should be taken as well. These two authoritative people, holding very important roles in the medical community, provide ample validation to the authors claim.

Overall, this seems to be a strong argument. I feel the author makes a legitimate point, that institutions need to adapt and enforce policies in response to the rising incidence of violations of patient privacy by medical school students. She has strong reasons and evidence which validate her claim but perhaps she could propose some methods that schools could employ to help the situation. I feel that this issue is extremely important for patients put their full trust in doctors hands and do not distinguish between a medical student and a board certified doctor. They look for help from whoever is assigned to provide help to them and therefore should not be cheated out of the patient-physician privacy "contract." I agree with the authors claim and feel methods should be determined to punish those who foolishly broadcast patient information on the web. If strict policies are enforced students will not misbehave because their life's work toward their MD would be on the line.