There’s no denying the appeal of physicians-only online chat rooms like Sermo and Medscape Physician Connect.

Most physicians fly solo or work in small groups and yearn for the camaraderie and social networking that pervaded their lives in the form of grand rounds, curbside consults and related banter during medical school and residency.

Besides, where else can you ask 100,000 colleagues what they’d do with your patient who likes to eat dirt or the one complaining of postcoital nausea?

Physicians pay nothing to join the sites, which make money by charging Big Pharma for the right to sit behind the one-way mirror and observe the unfettered chatter.

More recently, the sites have broadened their financial models.

For example last fall, Sermo announced a deal with Bloomberg that allows subscribing analysts and investors to post questions directly to the physician community about drugs , devices and trends.

For its part, Medscape offers paying customers access to tag clouds that track keywords hot off the keyboards of its physicians. The frequently used words can be sliced and diced by specialty, zip code, age and so forth.

“These are… aggressive and high-prescribing physicians, which makes them valuable to the pharma community,” Manhattan Research’s Erika Fishman told Newsweek.

Still, some worry about where sites like this must draw a line. Should they be required to notify authorities about the physician who claims that beetle juice works wonders for arthritis or the one who crosses a line on patient confidentiality?

Sermo CEO Daniel Palestrant says so far it hasn’t been a problem. “Physicians self-police incredibly well,” he said. Sermo has given the boot to only 3 physicians so far due to inappropriate behavior.

Awhile back, Minneapolis-based special educator Anne Harrington thought she noticed a spike in the number of kids needing services for autism. 

Then she noticed that an unusual preponderance of the kids were from families of Somali immigrants.

In fact 25% of kids needing intensive intervention for autism were Somali, even though only 6% of kids in public schools were Somali.

Now the word is out and the closely knit Somali community of 30,000 is terrified something’s amiss.

The Minnesota Department of Health and the CDC have called in their epidemiological sleuths to assess whether the apparent cluster is real.

The investigation faces extreme methodological challenges. For example since the cause of autism remains unknown, officials don’t know what they’re looking for from an etiological standpoint.

And since clinicians and schools don’t apply diagnostic criteria uniformly, it’s hard to trust counts of affected individuals.

Apparently a small study from Stockholm has shown that Somali children populated classes for autistic children at rates 3 times higher than expected given the size of the immigrant community, but checks of Somali communities in Seattle, San Diego and Boston have revealed nothing. 

Some were tempted to invoke living conditions in Somalia or Kenyan refugee camps until it was clarified that almost all afflicted individuals were born here.

Antivaccine activists have entered the fray even though Somali children get the same care and vaccines as other kids covered by Medicaid.

That concerns public health officials since many families visit Somalia frequently.

Measles remains an endemic child killer in that country.

Their pitch has worked, and many Somali parents “are resisting immunization,” Children’s Hospital pediatrician Daniel McLellan told the Times.

During his campaign to “change Washington,” the Big O frequently accused Bush of wantonly ignoring public disclosure rules and flaunting the state-secrets privilege at will.

Now it appears The Coronated One is doing a bit of that himself.

Obama’s Justice Team is seeking to dismiss a US District court case filed by an Oregon charity accused of funding terrorism on grounds that it threatens state secrets and national security.

It has even intimated it might abscond with classified documents currently in the court’s custody to prevent the charity’s lawyers from perusing them.

The Bush Justice Team regularly invoked “state secrets” to prevent civil liberties groups from accessing sensitive documents regarding offshore prisons for terrorism suspects, warrantless wiretapping of US citizens and other questionable behavior.

The charity, al-Haramain wants damages from the FBI and National Security Agency, alleging the Feds’ illegal eavesdropping of its board members and lawyers violated its freedom of speech and due process rights.

The charity is no longer in business. It claims its purpose was philanthropic and that the Feds have no evidence to support assertions against it.

“There has to be other ways to protect secret information without having to block accountability,” Erwin Chemerinsky, a law professor at UC Irvine told the Washington Post.

Justice Department spokesman Matthew Miller responded that it “has already moved on a number of fronts to ensure Americans have access to information about their government’s actions. With respect to state secrets, the attorney general has ordered a review of pending cases to ensure the privilege is only invoked when absolutely necessary.”

“At this point,” said Jon Eisenberg, the al-Haramain attorney, “I don’t feel like I need to do anything. The outrage speaks for itself.”