My last column was about using sweet solutions to manage pain in infants. It told you of a review of multiple studies that recorded the use of sugar water to decrease the pain of circumcision.
The point I was making was about the sugar water. But apparently some readers were only able to focus on the idea that the pain was caused by circumcision and they are anti-circumcision activists.
In spite of knowing little about me, someone on Facebook who calls himself “Brother K” decided to cause trouble for me. This gave me some experience with a problem called trolling.
I am not talking about trolling for fish or the friendly trolls that are depicted in the movie “Frozen.” I am talking about an ugly kind of troll.
There is a new definition of trolls and trolling involving the internet. It is defined as making a deliberately offensive or provocative online post with the aim of upsetting someone or eliciting an angry response from them.
I initially was unaware that this was taking place until I got an email from a lawyer telling me that I had been targeted by the anti-circumcision extremist Brother K. I was told that I should keep an eye on my Facebook page because he and others will post all kinds of nonsense if they found that page. I was also told that he harasses physicians. The lawyer expressed sympathy that this was happening and offered to help me if I needed it.
On the day after my column appeared in the newspaper, the president of the hospital where I was working in the emergency department received an anonymous phone call to complain about what a bad doctor the caller thought me to be.
Fortunately for me, the response from the hospital administration was supportive, expressing concern for my safety and for that of the rest of the hospital staff.
We had a discussion with the head of our hospital security about what to do if someone showed up at our hospital with malicious intentions toward me. We also talked to the nursing and registration staff to make sure they knew to contact hospital security if someone came looking for me.
The president of the emergency physician group I work for also called me regarding his support and advice as to how to stay safe.
Meanwhile, I received a few emails that, among other insults, called doctors like me “the scum of the medical profession.”
Through social media, I even tried to have a discussion with one of the people who actually used her real name. But she insisted on forwarding anti-circumcision propaganda and would not acknowledge that I wrote the column about pain management in infants and not about circumcisions. I even tried to make it clear to her that I have not done a circumcision in more than 20 years. But this did not seem to matter to her.
When I asked her if I could use her name in writing about trolling, she indicated that she did not think that what she was doing could qualify as trolling. She felt that she was merely trying to educate me and help me to see the error of my ways.
Fortunately, so far, the attack has been insults and thinly veiled threats. But it is impossible to predict the future perfectly.
I hope that this experience will simply run its course for me. However, I am concerned for others that might find their way into the cross-hairs (figuratively, hopefully not literally) of these extremists and others who choose trolling as a method for attacking people or ideas.
Since the aim of trolling is upset someone or elicit an angry response from them, these folks seem to have become the new bullies and the internet is their schoolyard.
I hope we can all find the courage to stand up to these trolls and move forward with our lives and our work.
Dr. Terry Gaff is a physician in northeast Indiana. Contact him at drgaff@kpcmedia.com or on Facebook. To read past columns and to post comments go to kpcnews.com/columnists/terry_gaff.
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