ad hominem

In my Jan. 2010 post "More on Perversity in the Healthcare IT World: Is Meditech Employing Sockpuppets?" I'd written that:

...

I welcome anonymous comments and have a thick skin - to a point. When the comments go ad hominem or perverse, I do consider deleting them.

At "Are Dissmissive Industry and Government Reactions to Physician Concerns about EHR's and other Clinical IT Simply Perverse?" I observed that cavalier dismissals of physician reports on HIT unusability and difficulties fit quite well the definition of "perverse:"

Merriam-Webster dictionary:

Perverse (adj).

In a provocative and excellent piece that integrates various HIT issues well, the post "Will health IT be Obama version of the Iraq War" by ZDNet Healthcare writer Dana Blankenhorn appeared today here.

The HISTalk site, a vendor-supported health IT "gossip" site, has a lower standard for its reader comments than more responsible healthcare blogs and websites such as HCRenewal, allowing anonymous ad hominem and other forms of hysterical or irrational argumentation to be posted without refutation.

In a way, this is good, because such posts may reveal sentiments held by a number of people but rarely expressed, except in an anonymous forum.