"Every time you post, recite the following to yourself as though it were a mantra: 'I am cutting rope with which to hang myself....'"

Advice to doctor bloggers, from Robert Lindeman, the pediatrician who blogged his own malpractice trial and then had his blog — which he'd been writing under the pseudonym "Flea" — exposed and used against him on cross-examination.

IN THE COMMENTS: Eric Turkewitz, whose interview with Lindeman appears at the link, writes:

I don't think I'd use detachment as the word for what he was doing. Rather, he seemed to be obsessed by the death of the boy and the idea of being blamed for it, perhaps understandably obsessed. And that seems to be what clouded his judgment.

Although I didn't use the word "detachment" — a commenter who calls himself "althouse too" did — I did write about "Flea" back here and posit a "disconnect between the writer taking a pose for literary effect and the real-world person." The doctor himself had characterized his blogger persona as a "cocky bastard."