After a long and grueling campaign and thousands of votes cast,we are ready to announce the winners of the 2009 Medical Blog Awards. While we monitored the voting and addressed issues and concerns, the public has made its voice heard.
First, a word about the sponsor
. Epocrates has been a proud supporter of these awards, helping to promote the medical blogosphere for the second year in a row. This year, Epocrates is giving all the winners an Apple iPod Touch, installed with a copy of its most popular Epocrates Essentials suite. The Best Medical Weblog winner will be getting the Epocrates Essentials Deluxe and a $50 iTunes gift card.
And now, please stand up and applaud the medalists:
The winner of the Best Medical Weblog of 2009 is Gary Schwitzer’s HealthNewsReview Blog. Gary used to be a professional health reporter. He is now a professor of journalism at University of Minnesota, focusing on medical reporting. Gary has become renowned for his critique of media’s coverage of health care topics. And that’s what his blog is mostly about: checking and correcting the weak, erroneous, and misleading reporting of medical science and industry on TV and in newspapers. We’d like to congratulate Gary on picking up the top prize in this year’s Medical Blog Awards!
Winning in this year’s Best New Medical Weblog category is Stanford Medical School’s SCOPE blog. Edited by the school’s staff writers, SCOPE covers medical news with a slightly academic angle, laced with a bit of opinion from a savvy group. We’d like to welcome these excellent writers to the medblog community, and we hope they will continue in the same spirit for years to come.
2009’s Best Literary Medical Weblog is StorytellERdoc. As the title implies, the blog is written by an ER physician conveying to us the stories from his emergency department. What sets this blog apart is the personal nature of the narrative, and how this anonymous author’s life story often finds parallels in the patients that he sees. If you’d like to get an idea for what it’s like to be an emergency clinician in one of America’s urban hospitals, StorytellERdoc will be happy to tell you.
The Best Clinical Weblog of 2009 is Life in The Fast Lane, last year’s winner of Best New Medical Blog award. Author Dr. Mike Cadogan is a physician of emergency medicine. On his blog, he discusses cases, reviews technology, and comments on the latest scientific findings. Dr. Cadogan is a very talented writer, and we’re glad to see that he so quickly established himself as one of the most prominent voices in the medical blogging community.
Best Health Policies/Ethics Weblog of 2009 category winner is Bob Doherty of the ACP Advocacy Blog. Representing the American College of Physicians on societal and public policy issues, he runs one of the more influential professional association blogs out there.
For the second year in a row, Bertalan Meskó’s ScienceRoll is the Best Medical Technologies/Informatics Weblog. This being one of our favorite categories, we’re excited to see our former editor have such success with his own blogging. Berci is a truly unique character. He has wholeheartedly embraced medical technology and is channeling future of medicine through his blog. He also teaches related topics at the University of Debrecen in Hungary. Congrats Berci, this must be like winning two consecutive Olympic gold medals in Nordic combined!
Last, but not least, is the winner of Best Patient’s Blog of 2009. Wheelchair Kamikaze is the blog of a fearless Manhattanite with Multiple Sclerosis. Marc, the author, covers MS news and what life is like to live with the debilitating disease. However, this blog certainly isn’t all about his affliction. In a lot of ways, it’s more about what is peripheral and outside of MS, simply from his point of view. Mark’s YouTube videos, shot from a camera attached to his wheelchair, give a hair-raising idea of what it’s like to be behind the wheel, and having a biting personality, while on a mission hurtling down Manhattan’s crowded sidewalks.
We congratulate all the winners. We feel that during the last year, the medical blogosphere has matured, and it now displays the level of writing, reporting, and commentary that challenges traditional media. Medgadget is happy to be a part of this vibrant and influential community, and we’d like to thank all the medbloggers out there for writing and reporting, and the readers for being such a great and supportive audience. Cheers, and until next year!
Link: 2009 Medical Weblog Awards announcement…