Further thoughts on bitcoin

Dos and don'ts
If you're not sure about setting up your practice to accept bitcoins, consider the following suggestions:

"If you don't believe in bitcoin, don't bother," Gomez said. Abramson echoes this, suggesting people not accept bitcoins "unless you understand the potential ramifications," including keeping your bitcoin account information secure (if it's lost, your bitcoins are gone forever, with no way to recover them), as well as exchange-rate fluctuations and government regulatory moves. And it's important to follow new developments in this rapidly changing community.

If you do accept them, Gomez suggested holding them, reflecting his belief that bitcoins will appreciate in value over time. Abramson said just the opposite, calling people who hang onto bitcoins "gamblers" playing a market that has fluctuated wildly, hitting highs of over $1200 per bitcoin in early December to around $600 right now.

That said, "it's easy to take bitcoin," Abramson said. "As a technology I think it's very interesting." He suggests accepting bitcoin "for amusement value," or perhaps as "a marketing move."

Changing behavior
Paul Abramson, MD, of My Doctor Medical Group in San Francisco offers addiction treatment as one of his services, and has found that accepting bitcoins brought him some unexpected business.

"I had some patients who had been buying drugs with bitcoins on Silk Road," an illegal-drug marketplace website that only handled transactions in bitcoins, but was shut down by the FBI in October 2013. "They had been buying heroin with bitcoins."

When they were no longer able to buy high-quality heroin, they decided to seek help from him instead.

As he observed, "you could buy both drugs or drug treatment with bitcoins." But then, "the same is true of hundred-dollar bills, so it's really not that novel."

Bad advice?
CoinMD, a website where users can ask medical questions from a group of anonymous people who claim to be doctors – paying for their advice in bitcoins, has been called "the absolute worst place on Earth to spend your bitcoins," by Wired.

While many of the site's advice givers may be well-intentioned and knowledgeable, and its convenience when it comes to diagnosing minor ailments may seem obvious, Wired points out that "no legitimate licensed physician" would take part in a project like this because they "they would risk losing their license." CoinMD doesn't define how it tracks its contributors or vets their credentials.

So while the idea behind the site might be great in theory, as Iltifat Husain, MD, a practicing emergency physician the editor-in-chief of iMedicalApps, explained to Wired, there's a "tremendous" risk of getting poor advice or a wrong diagnosis. "I would never recommend this site to a patient," he said.