In case there's any confusion: I am no Dr. Oz. I am not fantastically good looking, despite what my mother says. I'm not a cardiac surgeon and, of course, I don't have a wildly popular and influential TV show. I'm not able to look into a camera and convince millions of people at a time that the latest nutritional fad can bring them health, beauty, and dramatic weight loss.
As a result of all these deficiencies, I'm also not wealthy like Dr. Oz. (Unlike Dr. Oz I couldn't even make $1.17 million on a device to treat hemorrhoids.) That's one of the main reasons why I'm writing here today, reluctantly and sadly, to announce that CardioBrief will no longer appear on Forbes.
In the future my blog, CardioBrief.Org, will be published independently, though it will now contain advertising sold by Everyday Health, which publishes MedPage Today, the preeminent source for medical news for doctors and other medical professionals. Some of my CardioBrief posts will also be published simultaneously on Medpage Today. I look forward to working with Peggy Peck, Ivan Oransky, and the rest of the MedPage Today team. I hope I can live up to Peggy's description of me as "never an uncritical cheerleader."
I am extremely grateful to Matt Herper and the rest of the Forbes editorial team for giving me a platform on the Forbes network. As anyone who has been following the gyrations and evolution of online publishing knows, Forbes has been a major leader in innovation in this area. I am proud to have been a part of this important experiment.
As some of my regular readers may know, my Forbes posts were generally not written specifically for the core Forbes audience of investors and business people. My writing has been largely intended for doctors, though over the course of my tenure at Forbes I would occasionally write for a more general audience. I was only able to write for Forbes because there was considerable overlap with my job writing and editing CardioExchange, the cardiology website published by the New England Journal of Medicine. Now that publication of CardioExchange has been halted it is no longer economically possible for me to continue writing for Forbes.
Unless I am amazingly lucky I don't imagine that I will be able to equal Dr. Oz's wealth and success by publishing CardioBrief on MedPage Today. But I am hopeful that I will be able to make a decent living.
Just one final word about editorial independence: I will have no involvement with the advertising on CardioBrief. I fully intend to maintain my editorial independence and I have received strong support from the MedPage Today editors on this subject. In the end, the proof will be in the product.
(Apologies to TS Eliot, and Prince Hamlet, for the title.)
