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Sometimes I skim through news articles so rapidly that I misread headlines. One part of my mind may be moving faster than I have a chance to process the information or I may simply be conditioned to read what I expect to see. It's not uncommon for me to view headlines like "vacation policies must be changed" or "departments to fill vacancies" while my mind is doing a word twist resulting in me initially seeing words like "vaccination policies" and "fill vaccines." I viewed some headlines on an Internet news page today that I thought read "medical terrorists" prompting me to do a double take and check the headlines again.

First thoughts that manifested inside my 12 1/2 pound skull was that these were headlines for Michael Moore's SICKO film, which opened in theaters last Friday. No offense to anyone but that's where my head was that. Turns out that was not the case.

I scanned the headlines again and noticed there were blocks of articles using similar headlines. The first one that caught my eye was from the Bangkok Post... "Britain's medical terrorists" an article regarding car bomb plots in Britain. Below those headlines were some others... "three of eight terrorist suspects are medical doctors" from monsters and critics, "alleged terror cell drawn from medical world" from New Zealand Herald, "medical link to British terror attempts" from Tehran Times, "deadly medicine" from ABC news, "doctors of death" from Arab News.

In all honesty, my feeling is that these headlines are rather harsh but that's apparently what sells newspapers and gets people to click through on web sites. There must be over 500 articles related to the car bomb plot topic and quite a number mention medical doctors in the headlines.

While British authorities will be busy handling investigations related to the terror plots, medical authorities are going to have their hands full with public-relations campaigns.

Sometimes the most interesting things happen when you look up a search phrase. I can't imagine ever having done a Google search for the term medical terrorists but after seeing the news headlines I decided to check it out and see if there were actually any web sites using the phrase.

(We will not be providing links to any of the content mentioned below as it's rather off-topic for our typical content. If you want to seek information for yourself just do a Google search with the phrase medical+terrorists)

To my surprise, there was an insurance blog in the top of the results with an article about "medical terrorists" and they were not the young suspects appearing in todays worldwide news. According to the blog, these "terrorists" are folks in the US suggesting government controlled health care is better than our current free-market system.

An article from the Israel Ministry of foreign affairs was actually pretty interesting since it was apparently posted to an Israeli government web site in August of 2002. The post warned of terrorist organizations using medical services for purposes of disguising their activities.

As it turns out the term was used more frequently than I thought, with over 455 results appearing for the quoted phrase. Will be interesting to see how things change as these investigations continue.

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