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Why do we blog? What is the purpose of blogging about health care? Why should we care? Is there a point to it all? The Seven Tasks Blogging Manifesto was written to help build a unity of purpose among health care bloggers who desire to be of service to the public. The Seven Tasks are:

1. Be Cautious in Debate– The first principle here is to “do no harm.” Health care is a serious business and we should speak about it as if our opinions mattered. In this business, people are sick, injured and dying. There is no space for the self serving, the opportunist or the extremist.
2. Seek Clarity –The terms of the debate that we use must be understandable to each other. Politically ambiguous or unexamined language that smothers the real meaning of things should be avoided.
3. Build Comprehension — The use of private vocabularies, cryptic technical terminologies and impenetrable statistics just muddy up the waters and divide us into the haves and have-nots. Perplexing or indecipherable arguments that go nowhere, increase nobody’s understanding or simply rant on should be trashed. Proposals within the health care debate must be comprehensible to the rest of us.
4. Promote Compassion — People must assume more individual responsibility for their health and to a certain extent, be incentivised or otherwise socially pressured, to do so. But there comes a point when all the psychological gamesmanship must end, and human compassion must enter. To speak ‘truth to power’, bloggers must connect to the reality of human suffering in some personal way if they want others to take a meaningful interest in what they say.
5. Identify Conflicts of Interest – Commercialism has insinuated itself so covertly in the health care debate, that it is quite often impossible to separate private interest from the public interest. The debate should not be deprived of the many intelligent voices that the health-industrial-complex has to offer. But the voice of self-interest should not embed itself so deeply in the debate that it mistakes itself for the people’s voice.
6. Make Contact with the Real — Globalization threatens health care that is local, indigenous and personal. Health care bloggers should root themselves in healing’s real world, making contact one-on-one, and speak from that experience.
7. Find Consensus — Democracy is not about elections but about collective decision making. Health care impacts everyone. Everyone has a stake in health care development and public health policy. No consensus means no progress, no action. Building consensus, finding the common ground, is the priority task for the health care blogger.