Legal
Privacy & Legal
Privacy policy, disclaimers, and legal notices
Overview
The Poet Doctor ("we," "us," or "our") operates poetdoctor.com. This page informs you of our policies regarding the collection, use, and disclosure of personal information, as well as legal notices related to the content published on this site.
Information We Collect
We use cookies and similar technologies to understand how visitors find and use our site. No personal information is collected unless you voluntarily provide it.
Data Collected with Subscriptions
When you subscribe to our newsletter, we may collect: your email address, an optional first name, the form placement context (where on the site you signed up), your referral source, and any UTM campaign parameters (source, medium, campaign) present in the page URL.
Consent Logging
To meet our legal obligations, we maintain a server-side audit trail of consent events — subscribe, confirm, and unsubscribe actions. Each event records a hashed IP address and a truncated user-agent string. No raw IP addresses are stored at any point.
Analytics
We use Google Analytics and Cloudflare Web Analytics to understand site usage. These tools may process information such as page views, referral source, approximate region, and device/browser information. Google Analytics cookies are set only after consent where required. Cloudflare Web Analytics is configured without cookies; treatment under privacy laws may vary by jurisdiction.
Newsletter
If you subscribe to our newsletter, we collect your email address and optional first name. We use a double opt-in process: after signing up, you must confirm your subscription via a link sent to your email before receiving any mailings. Transactional and newsletter emails are sent via Resend(opens in new window).
You may unsubscribe at any time using the link included in every email. Upon unsubscribing, we retain a minimal record of your email address and consent history for legal compliance purposes but will not send further communications.
Bot Protection
We use Cloudflare Turnstile to protect our forms from automated abuse. Turnstile may collect interaction data, browser characteristics, and an anonymized token to distinguish humans from bots. No personal data is stored by Turnstile beyond what is needed for the verification challenge. For details, see Cloudflare's Privacy Policy(opens in new window) and Turnstile Privacy Addendum(opens in new window).
Data Retention
We retain different categories of data for different periods:
- Consent audit logs — retained indefinitely for legal compliance.
- Email subscription records — retained until you request manual deletion.
- Rate limiting records — automatically pruned on a rolling basis.
- Cookie consent preferences — stored in a browser cookie until you clear it.
Third-Party Service Providers
We work with a small number of third-party service providers who process data on our behalf:
- Cloudflare — hosting, content delivery (CDN), bot protection via Turnstile, and web analytics. See Cloudflare's Privacy Policy(opens in new window).
- Resend — email delivery for newsletter and transactional messages. See Resend's Privacy Policy(opens in new window).
Your Rights
You have the right to access, correct, or delete any personal information we hold about you. You may also opt out of Google Analytics tracking at any time using the cookie consent banner. Cloudflare Web Analytics cannot be opted out of as it does not track individual users or set cookies.
To exercise your data rights — including requests for access, correction, or deletion — please email privacy@poetdoctor.com. We aim to respond within 30 days.
About the Poetry
The poetry on this site arises from many sources, including reading, reflection, personal life, and the broader accumulation of experience that accompanies a life in medicine. Some poems are literary or philosophical. Others engage medical themes. Some do both.
When clinical experience informs a poem, the resulting work is shaped through an artistic process of compression, transformation, alteration, and imaginative reconstruction. Poems on this site are not presented as factual accounts of any actual patient, clinical encounter, or therapeutic relationship.
The author does not publish poetry that identifies, or for which there is a reasonable basis to believe it could identify, any patient or other private individual encountered through clinical work. For artistic and privacy reasons, details may be changed, merged, abstracted, omitted, or otherwise transformed.
Each poem undergoes an editorial process that may span months or years. Publication dates reflect the completion of that process and do not correspond to any particular clinical event, date of care, or identifiable encounter.
Written authorization or release from a patient or individual, determined to be legally sufficient under applicable law and institutional policy, is required prior to publishing any work that includes an identifiable reference to them from a clinical context. When such an authorized work is published, the fact that consent was granted will be explicitly disclosed alongside it.
Medical Disclaimer
Although the author of this site is a licensed physician, the content published here — including poetry, essays, and other creative works — is intended solely for literary and informational purposes. Nothing on this website constitutes medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment.
Use of this website does not create a doctor-patient relationship between you and the author. You should not rely on any content here as a substitute for professional medical advice. Always consult a qualified healthcare provider with questions about a medical condition or treatment.
The author and this website disclaim all liability for any actions taken or not taken based on the content of this site. Links to third-party websites or social media accounts are provided for convenience and do not constitute an endorsement of the information contained therein.
Institutional Disclaimer
The views, thoughts, and artistic expressions on this site are solely those of the author and do not represent the views, policies, or practices of any employer, hospital, clinic, university, or other affiliated institution, past or present.
Policy on Use of AI
The explanatory text on this website was written with AI assistance. All poems on this site are written by hand, without AI.
Copyright
Except as otherwise noted, the original poems and original text on this site are copyrighted works of the author. They may not be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted without prior written permission, except as permitted by applicable law.
Contact
If you have questions about this page, please reach out via Instagram(opens in new window). For data rights requests (access, correction, or deletion of your personal information), please email privacy@poetdoctor.com.