Ten Years of Medicine and Faith

March 2024 marks ten years since my first post at this blog. A lot has changed in the last decade, in my personal and professional life and in the world. The last time I did a state-of-the-blog post was in 2018, so I’m a little overdue. This post will be sort of like a flashback episode from a cheesy 1980’s sitcom.

First, let’s review some stats, all of which are current as of 1 March 2024. This is my 154th post on the site, so I have averaged 15.4 posts per year with a median of 9.5, ranging from 4 in 2015 to 42 in 2018. I don’t expect to post as frequently as I did in 2018 ever again unless something changes massively in my personal life.

My posting frequency has been influenced by other time-consuming things going on, including my job change in 2015, my large and awesome family, my distance running, and my music making. Some of my church callings have been busier than others, too. I spent some time as the assistant producer and fill-in host for a podcast in 2021, which I found interesting but didn’t really love. (There was also a Medicine and Faith Podcast for a while.) Serving my time in hospital leadership led to a minor burnout and a little venting into a snarky webcomic in 2022-2023 that I have since taken offline. (You can find a little sample here.)

The site appearance has evolved over time, beginning with a header image of an EKG strip with a silhouette of the Angel Moroni:

In 2018 I started hand-illustrating posts (cringe). Finally in 2020 I settled on the current standard cover image format and font, first used on this post, and I settled on a minimalist interface for the site. To celebrate the tenth anniversary of the blog I made a new cover image for some of the older posts that didn’t have any graphics. (My favorite is this one.)

This is not a high-traffic-volume site and never really has been. We average 4,068 views per year with median of 3,939, ranging from 1,298 in 2015 to 8,664 in 2018. The number of views per visitor is 1.6, and this has ranged from 1.4 in 2015 to 1.8 in 2022.

Here are the top ten all-time posts:

Rank	Post	Date	Views
1	The Book of Mormon – Alternate Chronology	10/18/2015	4829
2	The Whole Personal Protective Equipment of God	8/4/2018	1403
3	Memories of a Mentor	11/14/2017	1233
4	Questions in the Book of Mormon	9/7/2018	911
5	A Disease With Perks	9/24/2017	904
6	How to Spend Less Time at Work while Increasing Productivity	3/27/2022	666
7	Alternative Medicine	4/15/2018	646
8	Book Review: Kennedy’s Hugs	2/1/2019	631
9	Is There Something Wrong?	8/26/2018	602
10	Ministering for Sociophobes: A Practical Guide	6/10/2018	473

The least-read post of all time is the one from last week, which isn’t so surprising. It’s only been online for a week. Every so often I update the list of most-viewed posts over the previous 12 months on the Favorite Posts page.

I recently read an interesting article at Vox (which unfortunately contains some gratuitous profanity) about the burden of self-promotion shouldered by writers, artists, and musicians. The World Wide Web and social media have democratized content production and distribution so that basically anyone can produce creative works for a worldwide audience, but the responsibility for marketing largely falls on the creator. Everyone has to have a personal brand. Aspiring artists cannot hope to sign a deal with a publishing or media company unless they already have a large online following, and even the careers of successful people will live or die based on their luck with and obedience to social media algorithms.

Reading that article gave me flashbacks of my early years on this blog, when I was trying to figure out how to grow my audience and “win the game,” while simultaneously despising the game and its impact on my life. I made a conscious choice to disengage from that world, which was a luxury I could afford because I have an awesome day job. It was a hard choice to make, but I am still convinced that it was the right one for me.

Consequently, the purpose of this website has changed over time. I started out wanting to occupy and own the overlap zone in the blogosphere between my religion and my profession. The original name of the site reflected that intention, and so did the 2019 rebranding. In retrospect that was a lofty goal, and one that I was not willing to focus my life on achieving.

Within 5 years I was already starting to recalibrate for a smaller footprint to match the bandwidth I could tolerate. Writing can be fun, and it is a useful skill which I would like to have in more abundance. Also, sometimes I have an idea or a message that I simply want to share. Over time my purpose for writing this blog has boiled down to essentially that. I write about things that interest me and that are meaningful enough to motivate me to push another post over the finish line. Authenticity will be the consolation prize for not playing the game.

The subject of my writing still includes the overlap zone between medicine and faith, but over time I have gravitated more towards faith and made the medicine optional, probably because I get enough medicine from my job.

An early example of focusing on faith turned out to be the most-viewed post in the history of the site: The Book of Mormon – Alternate Chronology. This post from 2015 has been viewed twice as many times as any other post and accounts for 11.6% of all views.

Seeing that there was an interested audience for this kind of post opened up an opportunity to share more of my nerdy scriptorian side. Some of these follow-up posts have also been among the most viewed.

During 2020 and 2021 I wrote a number of posts about COVID-19. It was a time of uncertainty and lots of free time, so I found a lot of things to write about. The science of virology and vaccines was fertile ground for faith analogies. Also during the pandemic there was an increase in web searches for PPE, which brought in some traffic to a post I wrote in 2018 called The Whole Personal Protective Equipment of God. This is now the second-most viewed post in the history of the site, and 82% of its traffic came during 2020-2021.

Another genre I have sometimes ventured into is the book review. This started with Stop Physician Burnout, and then continued with Kennedy’s Hugs and Slave Stealers by Timothy Ballard. (I’m still not sure what to think of Ballard. At the time I wrote the review I didn’t realize what a controversial individual he is. No, I have not seen the movie.)

After I read Slave Stealers I wanted to go to the source materials, so I read several of the slave narratives for myself. The resulting post — On Bondage — went live right before the race riots erupted in 2020. I decided to double down on the subject, writing a multi-part series on what the Book of Mormon teaches about how to overcome racial tensions. I am not an antiracist in the academic DEI sense, because critical race theory is fundamentally divisive; I am pro-forgiveness, pro-understanding, and pro-unity. Several speakers in the October 2020 General Conference gave similar sermons on the subject, so I felt validated.

In 2017 I wrote a sketch of a controversial figure from my medical education, Dr. John Stang. I had some conflicted feelings about the man and needed to process my grief, but it turns out I wasn’t the only one. Many people wrote to thank me for the post, and it ended up being the spark that ignited a movement to create an endowed scholarship in his name at our medical school. I was honored to attend the first award ceremony in 2019.

Writing here has helped me understand my social anxiety, process my grief, record memories from my medical education, and manage my burnout. It has helped me hone my craft in communicating with patients about functional disorders, alternative medicine, including “medical” marijuana, and many other subjects.

So where do we go from here? I don’t have any plans to pack up the enterprise, or to change my current approach in any meaningful way. You can expect a new post a few times a year at more or less random intervals. I am not currently planning to write a book or do anything else really ambitious, but I will have a guest post published on a high-traffic blog later this year, so stay tuned for that announcement and link. (UPDATE 6/8/2024: Here it is.)

Thank you for reading, especially those of you who occasionally send me feedback. Having an audience gives me courage and motivation to keep putting myself out there.

— Alan Sanderson, March 2024

---

Alan B. Sanderson, MD is a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and is a practicing neurologist.