We live in a paradoxical age. Physicians say they're busier than ever just keeping up with the pressures of medical practice, yet more and more doctors are stepping forward to ask, "I want to be a blogger. How do I get started?"

Crazy, huh? Writing a regular blog can be both a creative struggle and a serious time suck, a mental and physical drain on energy needed for growing clinical duties. Doctors seem to know this instinctively. Yet it's clear that health providers are warming to the blogging medium for several reasons.

First, from a practical standpoint, there are actually time efficiencies to be gained from blogging. A well written, frequently updated blog can save time answering the same three or four exam-room questions hundreds of times each month.

Secondly, the 24/7 news media gives physicians a lot to talk about, including asserting counter-opinions to what they believe is an abundance of misinformation in news reports. (For examples, just look up anything on breast cancer and PSA tests in regard to the U.S. Preventative ServicesTask Force.)

In medicine, when is advertising a good idea for a specialty medical practice? Good question. Easy answer. Too easy: Just about never.

Beware the advertising sirens. They’re youthful, they’re lithesome, they’re gorgeous, and they sing alluringly. They're also seducers/seductresses who lure innocents to financial waste.

In referring to advertising, I'm talking about paying for space or time in traditional media such as newspapers, radio and TV. The lure of mass media is strong. It’s human nature to revel at the sight of your own name in lights.

For this reason alone, physicians are often easy prey to the sellers of ad space.  Time and time again, we see doctors drift almost helplessly toward the purchase of some public exposure on billboards, television, and in magazines and newspapers.

Time for a question to which every American should know the answer: Who gave the Gettysburg Address? No, it's not Abraham Lincoln. At least not technically.

Indeed, the 16th U.S. president gets credit for the November 19, 1863 speech dedicating the Soldier's National Cemetery in south-central Pennsylvania. However, the featured speaker for dedicating the memorial was none other than that famed American orator of sweeping intellectual legend, Edward Everett.

What? You've never heard of Edward Everett? The fact that you probably haven't illustrates a great literary truth: every writer needs an editor. As evidence, virtually none of us has grade-school memories of memorizing the words, "Standing beneath this serene sky, overlooking these broad fields now reposing from the labors of the waning year, the mighty Alleghenies dimly towering before us, the graves of our brethren beneath our feet..."

No, none of us remember those words for the simple reason that they lacked concise power. They needed an editor. As do so many blogs these days.

Just out this month, a new survey of Internet habits by the New York PR firm Makovsky + Company has uncovered a notable phenomenon: half of all Americans visit WebMD.com. That this website is popular is not particularly surprising. What is surprising is just how popular. How many other websites can boast attracting half nation's population? WebMD is in very rare company in this distinction.

More astonishing is the survey finding that Facebook is the fourth most popular online resource for health care information, drawing one in nine Americans for that purpose. However, user-generated content on social-media websites is less trusted - only 54 percent of survey respondents said they can rely on the accuracy of health information on Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and blogs, compared to 68 percent saying they trust WebMD.

Web pages published by the U.S. government are the most trusted, and, not surprisingly, websites sponsored or published by pharmaceutical companies are the least visited by Americans seeking health information (6 percent).

Notice anything missing here? Where is the survey question about health-information sites published by health care providers? Presumably, there are so few that it never occurred to the study sponsors to ask about them. Which leads us to the true digital gap in medicine today.