Back in my days editing the JME blog, we used to get the occasional unsolicited post sent to us. Almost always, they went unpublished; this was overwhelmingly because they weren't very good. The one person who did sometimes get his unsolicited work published was the ethicist-turned-barrister Daniel Sokol. There was a number of reasons why we were a little more forgiving of him: he was someone we knew, and a reasonably well-known person in the field - he had a fairly regular column in the BMJ; his submissions, while sometimes a bit self-congratulatory, were often fairly inconsequential - but they were by the same token pretty harmless, so could tide us over during those periods when we had little to say of our own; and, finally, if we did reject his submissions, we could more or less guaratee that they'd appear on the BMJ's own blog anyway, so there wasn't much point our trying to act as gatekeeper.
A post by him appeared on the JME blog a few days ago, detailing the help he had been able to give a doctor, one Tarek Seda, who had found himself in professional trouble and facing a hearing from the Medical Practitioners' Tribunal Service in 2019. This post purported to be a brief account by Dr Seda of how Sokol was tremendously helpful, andit was supplemented by an account by Sokol himself of how Sokol was... er... tremendously helpful.
Now, I do not know whose idea the post was - in the comments, Sokol writes that
[a]fter the outcome of the MPTS hearing, Dr Seda selflessly asked how he could help other doctors in a similar situation. One suggestion was to write an article, giving a dual perspective on the process of ethics remediation: the doctor’s and the ethicist’s. This blog is the product of that idea.
This tells us little about whose idea the post was, although I do have my suspicions - and I'll come back to that in a moment. But it will not have escaped anyone's attention that the post as a whole does come across rather as an advertorial. Evidence for this can be produced from the final sentence of the post proper, and the supplementary text that follows it:
