Public physician Jen Gunter’s important work taking down Goop is covered in today’s New York Times, A Doctor Gives Gweneth Paltrow’s Goop a Pelvic Exam.

While controversial to some, Jen Gunter epitomizes what it is to be a public physician. In her self-styled form of public advocacy she has used her personally built site to help the consuming public separate hype from reality.

While many physicians in the public conversation have grown sterile and institutionalized in their approach, Jen Gunter has leveraged her voice for good in a way reminiscent of early internet physicians. While wielding ‘the lasso of truth,’ right from wrong eclipses social correctness in a style that’s all her own.

Of course the mainstream media couldn’t tell the story of a self-made media figure without characterizing her platform as ‘small potatoes’ and ‘too meager to measure.’

Dr. Gunter’s blog is small potatoes. It is hard to navigate and antiquated in design, and failing to meet comScore’s threshold of about 50,000 unique visitors a month, its web traffic is too meager to be measured.

Even when covering those who defy the very hype-and-traffic trap that created Goop they can’t get beyond Comscore as a measure of what makes something meaningful or important. And when pageviews become the measure of meaningful work and thinking, we’re all in trouble.

Let Jen and the work of others serve as a reminder to the New York Times that despite being small potatoes, we as physicians and health professionals are the media.

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