Occ-Env-Med-L Internet Mail-list

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Ongoing and unfettered support for this electronic forum is provided by

Welcome to the Occ-Env-Med-L

• This forum is the premiere (FREE!) means for clinicians and public health professionals to instantly send information to 1000's of readers all over the world, and to receive near-instantaneous information from colleagues elsewhere, using a message multiplier at a single e-mail address. Those who list themselves are connected by their interest in Occupational & Environmental Medicine. We hope that this will become a daily opportunity for contact among the 1000's of us who would like to make technical and clinical information available for free and instantly.

Occupational & Environmental medicine represents a growing clinical and public health discipline, seeking to evaluate and prevent the diseases and health effects that may be related to activities and exposures at work and from other environments (eg environmental contamination).

The Occup-Env-Med Mail-list provides a forum for announcements, dissemination of text files and academic discussion. The forum is designed to allow presentation of clinical vignettes, synopses of new regulatory issues and reports of interesting items from publications elsewhere (both the medical and the non-medical journals).

For a general (and unbiased) discussion of the etiquette and governance of maillists like this, go to this thoughtful site.

The Association of Occupational & Environmental Clinics represents the first nucleus of members for the list, and will use the list for announcements. AOEC members are either:

• interested clinics with approved credentials documenting expertise in Occupational & Environmental Medicine
• individuals interested in sharing this topic, but who have no requirement to show advanced training or expertise.
Professional affiliations of the Mail-list subscribers include:
• Occupational Physicians and Nurses
• Industrial Hygienists
• Government Public Health officials
• University investigators
• Regulators of Occupational & Environmental Health topics

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Subscription Options:
We now have 3 different formats for the mail-list:

• Regular OEM-L
• Generally, up to 10 messages daily
• Individual subject lines tell subscriber what each message is about, and are distinguished from non-broadcast mail by inclusion of the OEM: subject prefix.
• Messages are received immediately, but are mixed into recipient's individually addressed e-mail
• Replying to message is automatic, within your e-mail system.
• Messages arrive the hour that they are posted, allowing more dynamic interaction with the OEM-L community.

 

• Digest OEM-L

• Only one message daily (midnight US Eastern Time), representing the combined message traffic on the maillist for that day.
• More easily ignored (or read when time becomes available).
• More challenging to reply, since compounded message has no real author and address must be copied from content to "TO:" line.

• OEM-Announce

• Fewer than 20 messages each week.
• Messages are NOT part of a community's discussion of issues, but are simple declarative announcements, including:
• new web-sites
• upcoming conferences
• release of educational materials
• job openings
• regulatory changes
• Replies are possible only as individual messages to the author, and no broadcast messages or interactive discussions occur.
• Messages are entirely reviewed and approved by the moderator, and are re-sent to the Announce list once or twice weekly from other electronic forums (including the OEM-L)
• All content is also sent to the OEM-L discussion forum. The Announce list is just a subset of the open OEM-L.

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How to subscribe:

• For subscribing to the OEM-L discussion forum (whether for individual or digest format), jump to this website, and complete the form, asking only your name and e-mail address. You'll have to respond to a confirmation e-mail, and then you're part of our online community.

• Digest options for daily composite messages provide alternative formatting for the same content. Your e-mail client program (in your PC) may or may not be able to handle MIME formatted mail, and you may have to choose ASCII composite archive files.  Options are easily adapted by returning to the subscription website.

• For subscribing to the less exciting, less demanding OEM-Announce, jump to this website, and complete the form, asking only your name and e-mail address. You'll also have to respond to a confirmation e-mail, and then you'll begin receiving timely announcements about Occupational & Environmental Medicine issues.

• If either of the above seems impossible or technically challenging, please simply drop an e-mail to Dr. Greenberg at GNGreenberg@gmail.com.

To initiate or to reply to any message posted to the list, please follow the following steps:

• First, decide if you think that the rest of the readers of the list will be interested in your message or response.
• We do want to read what you think if it explains a clinical query, a management problem or a regulatory issue.
• We do want to read about your ideas, opinions, observations, etc. regarding recent news items or net resources that you heard about if they're about Occupational & Environmental Medicine, not about the internet itself. Don't post announcements regarding internet resources that pertain to other topics than clinical and public health issues regarding occupational and environmental health.
• We don't want to read every response to a survey question that somebody posted to the group as a whole. Address those only to the individual who asked.

• When you've decided whether to broadcast your message to the list as a whole or to an individual, choose the address appropriately:
   
• Messages to the individual are addressed to him/her. That's usually listed as the "FROM:" part of the broadcast message's header. Some messages are routed to the list from the 'ListOwner' box at ggreenberg@nc.rr.com.... but that's NOT who wants to hear from you. Make the effort to copy the correct address to the TO: line in your mailer.

Messages to the whole group are addressed to: Occ-Env-Med-L@listserv.unc.edu (note that it's OCC-ENV-MED-L, not '1' atend)

Please notice that when you want to address something to the list-as-a- whole, that you need to explicitly add the address of the list. If you only assign the default "reply", you're only talking to the one person who posted the originating message. That means that the list would show only questions, never answers. What a shame. Please remember to let us all hear your thoughts when your answer has general utility.
 

• Sign your messages and disclose who you are, personally and professionally. Most folks include in their signature a disclaimer, to distance their views from their employer's. You'll get more appropriate answers to your queries and replies (directed at what you need to know, not what you already know) if folks can tell whether you are a doc, nurse, IH/safety person or other. You'll also be more persuasive if people know with whom they're disagreeing.

• This forum is more monitored than moderated... since messages are posted directly, without review or approval. Only those sent by non-subscribers (or by those whose messages are accidentally delayed by the broadcast software) are seen by anyone before reaching the mailboxes of all of us.  Even those are posted simply as a courtesy to the originator,and are not the responsibility of the host.
  That means that anything sent to the list is automatically BROADCAST to all subscribers. This is a pain if the msg is secret or even just trivial. Responses to messages CAN be selectively addressed (ie, to the individual who posted the message or to just a few individuals) and this is suggested for any message that the group as whole would find uninteresting (especially replies).

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• Use this address: Occ-Env-Med-L@listserv.unc.edu *ONLY* to post to the list-as-a-whole.

Standards of behavior:

Remember that >4,000 readers, from all over the world (70+ countries as of 2005) are going to get your message, so be brief and easily understood.
• Case Presentations, ending with "what do I do next?"
• Ethical concerns
• Requests for technical expertise, usually free and off-the-cuff.
• Remember, if you tell the rest of us where you've already looked for information, you'll get a better reply, since it'll respond directly to your level of prior knowledge
• Requests for collaborators, either research or business.
• Queries about management of potentially exposed populations, including medical surveillance.
• Announcements
• hot topics
• regulatory issues
• case reports with effect on usual practice
• news events.
• conferences
• One announcement per event please
• pending regulatory changes
• Job postings
but only from the actual employer, not from commercial head-hunters and placement agencies

If you find that a question is of particular interest to you, than the best way to capture all the information provided in reply is to ask the individual who posted the original query to copy replies to you.  Do NOT request that the whole list-community also address replies to you. "Me-Too" messages are NOT encouraged.

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Forbidden Message Styles:

These rules are actually punishable, first with a warning, and then by permanent prohibition from further posts.
Since the list's archives are mounted in the WWW, ejection from receiving the list's traffic seems pointless.

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• Insulting, Unprofessional Language

The intention is to have dialogue occur in a friendly, informal tone. Nonetheless, if participants choose to disagree, they should refrain from damaging the list's decorum. When members disagree with one another, they should adopt a MORE formal tone than usual, similar to published Letters to the Editor.




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• Easy, Fundamental Queries

Our community at OEM-L is **NOT** a free reference tool that can replace your own reading and research. Questions should only arrive within our forum AFTER the questionner has looked into the usual resources, usually consisting of BOTH of:
• Medical textbooks about OEM (Rom, Rosenstock, Zenz, LaDou)
• MedLines at NLM for a search of the published literature
Posted messages should even mention what was found during that effort... discuss why that investigation failed to answer the question.

A crucial exception: Queries from developing countries will  be accepted without any quibbling about prior research and groundwork. Nobody expects such participants to have equal technical resources to those in N. America, N. Europe or Australia/NZ.



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• Charitable Pleas

Despite the temptation that might be there to reach thousands of sympathetic and well-paid colleagues, do NOT solicit donations to your favorite and even urgent worthy cause.  There are countless needy situations which solicit support for victims of unimaginable tragedies on a daily basis.  Most responsible professionals do make an effort to contribute their time and dollars to such efforts, but apart from their participation in this public health assembly. No exceptions, please.



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• Attachments to Mail Messages

Don't broadcast mail attachments, whether photographs, executable code or formatted Word documents.
Unlike 'vanilla ASCII' e-mail text, these are often HUGE download obstructions, and are capable of carrying inadvertant viruses to our entire community. If there's an image or program or document or even a sound file that our group needs to see, the sysop will review it and post it in links from the WWW page.



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• Entire Web Pages

Don't broadcast the entire text of a web page.
• First of all, the page is already available to the readership, and providing the address (URL) is all most require to visit there.
• Secondly, it's very easy to accidentally send several attached files, including graphics, fonts, etc.
• Thirdly, many mail programs simply create an attachment of any too-long message (like a large web-page), so many careful readers may not even risk opening the message at all.
• Lastly, many web-pages are copyrighted, and a whole-cloth broadcast is a violation of the owner's rights, and a liability to the reposting "author" and this forum.

The best approach is to provide a description of the resource and its advantage to OEM-L participants, the full URL (including the "http://" part) and 1-2 paragraphs of its content. We want to invite the reader to utilize the document onsite.




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• Anonymous messages

OEM-L requires information about your professional role and your employment. Answers to your query can be more easily composed if the forum knows whether you're a nurse, physician-specialist, hygienist or resident.
It is also required to show how your employment relates to situation in question, whether as a consultant to a litigating attorney, a staff employee of the employer, or as the patient's own physician.

Sign your message and give it an appropriate subject line.
ANONYMOUS POSTS ARE FORBIDDEN, unless posted by the moderator for a good reason.



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• Non-professional queries

This is NOT an invitation to describe your own medical situation. Patients are welcome to review this forum's proceedings, but should not introduce their own case-histories or the complicated clinical saga for family members. We'd be glad to hear specific questions from their doctors, and the AOEC will help to find them appropriate specialists (202) 347-4976.




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• Confidential Details

Posting cases or real-life tales to the OEM-List is a good idea, but there's usually no advantage to include identifiers of the patient, the employer, or the other clinicians involved in the specific situation. When such common sense rules of confidentiality are violated, any consequences are the responsibility of each message's author, and not the forum's moderator, sponsors or the host of the software where it is managed.



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• Advertising

The OEM-List is NOT for free advertising or commercial promotions, of supplies, services, software or any material, even where our group would seem to be an ideal market audience.  Those with commercial interests may provide rare, brief, professional, factual responsive messages (to actual topics initiated by other forum participants), but should limit their self-promotion to disclosing their affiliation and providing contact information at the end of their message.

As noted above, job postings are allowed, but only from the actual employer, not from commercial head-hunters or from placement agencies. Such agencies may choose to become corporate sponsors, and then will be allowed monthly announcements without this restriction, but only in exchange for major support for the forum's infrastructure.



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• Excessive Quoting

Please remember that some of our readers have limited "bandwidth" or mailbox size, and that messages replying to prior postings need to be very selective regarding what's retained to include inside the next message. The most common (and aggravating) situation is when respondents re-quote the entire daily digest from a previous day's post, when what's necessary is just a few lines of a single message.

• If you have any questions regarding this page, please contact Gary N. Greenberg, MD, MPH.

Sponsors:

The Occ-Env-Med-L Mail-list and these resources originated at Duke , but are now housed at the University of N. Carolina, School of Public Health. As faculty member, Dr. Greenberg is allowed to run this cyber-outreach without interference, and the servers where these aggregate materials are housed and the maillist is managed, are each part of the University's global infrastructure, provided without direct or proportionate user fees.

Ongoing and unfettered support for this electronic forum is provided by the following list of contributors. These organizations and individuals are generously providing support to University of N. Carolina to compensate for Dr. Greenberg's time and resources that hosting this forum requires.
 
 

Members' SubSections:

Private Practice of OEM Medical Informatics Section

The Association of Occupational and Environmental Clinics has been a supporter of the maillist since its origins, and represents a good cross-section of exactly the multi-disciplinary kind of professionals the list is intended to serve. The organization not only serves the maillist by referring members to join, but is a financial supporter as well. AOEC is supported by ATSDR (the Agency for Toxic Substances & Disease Registry) and NIOSH (the National Institute of Occupational Safety & Health).  NIOSH has also provided direct support for web-release of certain pages and materials.

BASF Occupational Medicine and Health Protection Our Vision:  That work-related diseases no longer occur at BASF.

Concentra combines its highly reputable occupational health care with its unique capacity for analyzing case outcomes of over 5 million Concentra patient visits.  This combination is used in both our medical centers and our on-site employer locations to deliver evidence-based prevention, treatment and management strategies, quality improvement initiatives and best practice patterns in both the occupational medicine and workers compensation arenas. Strongly committed to on-going training and education, Concentra physicians participate in local, regional and national medical programs, publish research papers and nationally respected medical textbooks in the field of occupational medicine.  Concentra clinicians—the foundation of our recognized leadership in occupational medicine—practice in 35 states at over 250 medical centers.

Integritas, makers of STIX Software for Occupational Health & Safety, and Workers' Compensation managed care.

Medlock Consulting, a premiere search firm specializing in Occupational and Environmental Medicine.  Medlock Consulting’s professional background includes over fifteen years in the recruiting industry, including ten years specializing exclusively in the recruitment of occupational medicine physicians. Medlock Consulting has successfully completed assignments for Fortune 500 corporations, hospitals and clinics.

OEM Health Information, publishes The OEM Report, and is the distributor for hundreds of books for physicians, nurses, and others interested in occupational and environmental health and safety. Its book publishing division, OEM Press®, publishes Science on the Witness Stand; Evaluating Scientific Evidence in Law, and Low Back Pain; An Evidence-Based, Biopsychosocial Model for Clinical Management & other books pertinent to occupational and environmental health and safety.

Colleague Supporters:

Those who participate in the forum are also encouraged to support its continuity. These are individuals and firms who recognize that the OEM-L network is an important element in the development of Occupational & Environmental Medicine, and who value the opportunity to reach other professionals easily, to share announcements, information, and ideas.

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• Other sponsorship opportunities for this forum and for the web-sites which support it are available. Contact Gary Greenberg, MD

Please, at least once, read our Disclaimer: for the assignment of blame.