There is no doubting the power of the internet and technology in today’s modern society. Data is uploaded, shared, sent, downloaded, etc. at an extremely rapid rate throughout the entire world. This has major implications for many fields, including the medical field, regarding the amount and type of information being spread.
Researchers at the University of British Columbia have found that using different social media platforms can be helpful to physicians. Lead researcher and Neurology professor, Julie Robillard, claims that through the use of different social media platforms (namely Twitter), physicians are more knowledgeable about current research and more prepared to answer questions from their patients.
It is well known that many people go online for health information for many reasons: doing research, participating in discussions, diagnosing oneself based off of symptoms, etc. Robillard’s research team used this idea and focused their research on who is generally involved in these discussions, the spreading of information, and what kind of information is being shared.
Robillard’s team focused specifically on monitoring conversations on Twitter about stem cell research related to spinal cord injury and Parkinson’s disease. Her team found that approximately, “25 percent of the tweets about spinal cord injury and 15 percent of the tweets about Parkinson’s disease were from health care professionals.”
As with many discussions that take place in these online platforms, Robillard’s team expected to see much debate on these topics (specifically on stem cell research). To their surprise, they found that most of the tweets in these discussions were related to research and links to different reports. In Robillard’s words, “People are sharing ideas of hope and expectations much more than anything else.”
Twitter and other social media sites create a very new atmosphere for physicians and health researchers. It allows for them to freely (and quickly) share verified information amongst each other, while limiting the spread of misinformation, overall creating more knowledgeable health professionals. Twitter, with its large amount of users, also allows for quicker distribution of information and research breakthroughs to the general public.
You might not have thought that a social media site like Twitter could have such an impact on the medical society. However, the medical field has been evolving so much and so quickly over time that many aspects of it have essentially become integrated with technology and the internet; it was only a matter of time until medicine’s reach spread further into technology and integrated itself with social media.
Robillard’s team’s research was presented at the 2015 Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and it was certainly eye-opening. Although this study only sampled a very small size, it holds much more potential and opens the door to further research surrounding this topic. Additional studies and research may be conducted in the near future to determine if there is a distinct correlation between the use of social media by physicians and their respective increase in awareness of what their patients are expecting.
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