Yesterday my brother posted an instagram picture of him at a walk for Mysthenia Gravis, the autoimmune disorder we learned in physiology. I had only just learned of this disease a few days ago, and here was my brother - a geologist in Seattle - posting about raising awareness for MG.
One of his co-workers suffers from this condition and his caption was "MG is an autoimmune disorder that breaks down the communication between nerves and muscles. Build awareness! And eat beautiful burritos". I saw in his comments, his friends talking about how they'd never heard of MG before.
The power of social media has huge implications in educating (with facts and with fake news) large amounts of people. I find out about a lot of cool new medical interventions and technologies from instagram through "insiderscience" and many other medical instragram accounts. I also weirdly follow a lot of other female physicians' so that I can read about their journeys throughout their training. Doctor offices have their own instagram handles to entice new patients and I'm wondering how this will play out in the next few years. You can even watch surgical procedures on instagram!
Will instagram still be as popular as it is today? Can we catalog medical diseases in easily digestible photo packages with hashtags and accounts like Instagram for future specialties that are regulated and factual? Instagram educates specialists and laymen alike- but what are the limits? What are the precautions? 10 years ago, practices HAD to have websites to be considered legitimate. Is Instagram the new website?
A quick pubmed search of "instagram AND medicine" produced only 71 articles as of today, October 2, 2018. Most of the titles also had the words "millenials."
Although it is hard to say if Instagram itself will be around in the future, I, like you, find value in social media when it comes to medicine. I think there are many great pages out there that can educate people about the current state of affairs in medicine. I still think medical journals and other paper form information is valuable but social media reaches such a large audience that is hard to say it is not a great platform for providing information to the public. I think it is important to remember the rule of the internet though and not believe everything we see. We must analyze the information and fact check it if we believe anything may be too good to be true. For all the good, truthful information out there we have to be careful of those leading us astray.
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ReplyDeletePersonally speaking, I do agree that social media is a great resource for medical communication. Many people today, individuals and medical professional alike, all use social media to connect with others about medical interests, groups, specific illnesses, similar medical conditions, etc. Reading the study by Avci et. al. (2015), they conducted a study where 482 medical students participated in a survey that looked at how many used social media and their attitudes toward its use in the medical field. Results showed that 93.4% of the medical students that participated in the survey used Facebook on a daily basis and they believed that social media is very advantageous in the medical world (Avci et. al., 2015). However, looking on the ethics side of things, there were no negative effects from what the researchers analyzed within their study, but they did come across other studies where patient confidentiality was an issue with medical students and social media postings. Therefore, I think there should be guidelines that must be met when posting medically related information online, especially for medical professionals.
ReplyDeleteAvcı, K., Çelikden, S. G., Eren, S., & Aydenizöz, D. (2015). Assessment of medical students' attitudes on social media use in medicine: A cross-sectional study.BMC Medical Education, 15, 18. doi:http://dx.doi.org.dml.regis.edu/10.1186/s12909-015-0300-y