Yes, darling readers, it is indeed that time once again when all navel-gazing pundits whip up their Top 10 or Best Of lists for the year that is quickly passing. Let’s do that too here on The Nag.

But first, I want to say Happy New Year to all my readers, and especially to those of you:

• who choose to share what you like here with friends, family or perfect strangers
• who take the time to leave your astute, challenging or sometimes downright funny comments here – I love reading your feedback!
• who follow The Nag via RSS feed, Twitter, or email subscriptions (you too can do this just by clicking the appropriate Follow The Nag buttons on the right sidebar of the homepage). I sincerely appreciate your company here.

Now here’s that Top 10 List of the most widely read Nags for 2012:

• 1.  NEJM editor: “No Longer Possible to Believe Much of Clinical Research Published” (former New England Journal of Medicine editor Dr. Marcia Angell describes the alarming state of what your doctor is reading in medical journals; this post was in #6 place last year, but in 2012 it attracted almost three times more readers than our second place post did)

• 2.  Waiter’s Phony $10 Tip Includes a Religious Lesson (as the mother of a daughter who put herself through six years of university toiling as a restaurant server, I was disgusted by the Christian tipping trend I wrote about here; this post’s 2012 Top 10 ranking was due entirely to one thrilling day on Sunday, November 4th that brought a record-setting 7,623 views of this post – most linked here via Reddit by similarly disgusted wait staff!)
  

• 3.  Microwave Popcorn: (Still) Bad For You (who knew that so many people eat, or even care about, microwave popcorn?)

• 4.  What We Can Learn About Medicine From Watching Grey’s Anatomy (a sleeper, first written in January 2011 but finally on the Top 10 list for 2012)

• 5.  Four Marketing Tricks That IKEA Uses to Seduce Us (and who doesn’t love going to IKEA, really?)

• 6.  Why The Olympics Are Bad Business (I wrote this in 2010 about our own Vancouver Olympics that February, but it also made the Top 10 list in 2011 and then again in 2012, no doubt due to the London Games)

• 7.  Why Doctors Get Sued (hint: it’s not because of greedy patients and their even greedier lawyers – this article was also last year’s #9 ranked post in 2011)

• 8.  Is Your Life As Awesome As You Pretend It Is on Facebook? (in which I continue my cranky old lady ranting about anti-social media)

• 9.   The New Therapeutics: 10 Commandments (U.K. physician Dr. John S. Yudkin wrote these delightful rules on how to practice medicine for his colleagues, but was apparently dissuaded from publishing them due to “American religious sensitivities” until this laymen’s translation into plain English by Dr. Alice Dreger and Dr. Aron Sousa)

• 10.  “Falling In Love in Six Acts” – The Best Ad Campaign Ever (my secret crush on an iconic 1993 ad campaign revealed)

A number of my Ethical Nag posts were also picked up and republished as guest posts on other websites in 2011, including:

• How Drug Companies Get the Clinical Trial Results They Want – October 22, 2012
• Has the Health Industry Co-opted Patient Engagement? – October 16, 2012
• The Myth of Osteoporosis: Blowing the Whistle on the Epidemic – July 16, 2012
• Should We Stop Calling It Prostate “Cancer”? –  March 19, 2012

I absolutely love my WordPress stats page here on The Nag.

This is a behind-the-scenes daily web tool that lets me monitor which of my articles you are reading most often, which external links you are clicking while reading those articles, and even what search words or phrases you have typed into Google to land here in the first place. Fascinating stuff.

For example, the top referring sites last year were:

• Google (followed way back by other search engines like Bing, Yahoo, Ask.com, etc.)
• Twitter (first time on the annual top referrers list)
• Facebook.com
• Reddit.com
• Heart Sisters (my other blog – go visit already!)
• Pinterest (also first time on the top referrers list)

The stats page also keeps up with the number of visits here (almost 307,000 so far). The busiest traffic day here in 2012 was Sunday, November 4th with 8,076 total visits (thanks mostly to those irate restaurant servers!)

Average daily readership has more than doubled compared to this time last year. Most of you are from the United States, with Canada and the U.K. not far behind – but I’m tracking growing numbers in 2012 from Australia, India, the Philippines, Germany, France and Singapore – in fact, over 180 countries in total!

If this website were the country of Liechtenstein, in fact, it would take about three years for that many people to see it, according to my WordPress helper-monkeys, who wrote me yesterday:

“Your blog had more visits than a small country in Europe!”

There were 95 new posts published here in 2012, boosting the total archive of Nags to 333 articles since I launched this site in 2009 when, as a freshly-diagnosed heart attack survivor, I first became alarmed by what’s now known as “marketing-based medicine”. This refers to Big Pharma’s pervasive influence on that fistful of daily cardiac meds that my doctors prescribe for me and for all heart patients. My 30+ year career in the public relations field also allows me to smell a spin a mile away – which I like to translate from PR/marketing-speak as much as possible for you here!

Once again, my sincere thanks to you for your engagement in what engages me, too. Happy 2013 to you all.

Cheers,

Carolyn Thomas – Victoria, British Columbia, Canada

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Q: Do you have a favourite Ethical Nag post?