Wow: ”medical journals” & headhunters want me?!?

Do they think they’re getting Albert Schweitzer?

I’m just an old, retired, health care journalist. When I was 20, I wanted to be a sports journalist. But a high school buddy chastised me for wanting to “spend the rest of your life telling the results of games of people in their underwear.” The TV station I started with already had 4 top-notch sports guys. The news director offered me a job that he said “Nobody else wanted because nobody wants to work with doctors all the time.” It was a medical reporting beat. For survival and promotion to a full-time beat, I grabbed it and never looked back in the ensuing 52 years.

Now, though, nary a day passes without my email inbox filling with invitations from questionable medical journals.

I can’t cut my toenails adequately, much less make significant contributions to the field of surgery.

I recall with vivid horror how desperate I was, as a tenure-track assistant professor in journalism, to get peer-reviewed papers published so that I could make that huge (not) leap to all the privileges (definitely not) that came with being promoted to associate professor. I would have given my left appendage of the journal editors’ choice to have four publishing opportunities open up for me - by invitation - in one day, as happened recently.

Headhunters also come trolling for my talents.

Hmm…should I apply for that heme/onc physician gig for $500/hour?

I wonder….

What is this? Is it artificial intelligence gone awry? Bots gone batty?

What if I did respond? Some human, at some point - early in the process, I would hope, but who knows? - some human would have to waste his/her/their/my time even further by exploring my true expertise and then writing back. “Sorry, Mr. Schwitzer, but we don’t see that you earned your Surgery merit badge in Boy Scouts.”

I know that these kinds of emails are nothing new to many health care professionals or even to many health care journalists. But we often keep it to ourselves.

But I wonder if any of my physician colleagues - oops, I can’t say that because I’m not a physician - or my health journalism colleagues ever bite on these offers? If you did and you’re reading this, please share your story in the comments below. You may use an alias if you must - especially if you don’t want your current boss to know you were/are looking.

For those of you without physician colleagues or health journalism colleagues, I just wanted to share the inside world of wonder - of opportunity - that awaits those of us who post a true biosketch anywhere online that mentions:

• health

• health care

• medicine

• biomedical research

Other qualifications that may have misled the bots or AI brains as they scoured my social media posts:

• I had knee surgery once

• I married a nurse

• my mother-in-law was a nurse

• my physician brother-in-law trained at Mayo

• I once interviewed famed surgeons Michael DeBakey and Thomas Starzl

• I know what heme/onc means

• I like free dinners (but they would learn that I don’t accept them from pharma)

• I like big, bright bandaids with cartoon characters on them

• People tell me I look like Dr. Albert Schweitzer (no relation)

Can you tell the difference? Could AI? I wonder.

Are there any health agency openings in the Trump administration?

I wonder how my qualifications stack up against some of those other Administration candidates we’ve all been reading about.

Gosh, this is exciting.