Medicine in the Age of Twitter
I blog, I tweet and I use Facebook. And as I recently told a medical colleague, social media has been an enormously useful tool in my work.
“I can barely keep up with e-mail,” he snorted back. “I’m not about to open up that black box.”
About 15 years ago, during my residency and just as the first blogs were starting up, I took care of a patient in his mid-40s whom I’ll call Eddie. In a waiting room filled with elderly patients crippled by vascular disease, Eddie looked out of place. Until you looked closer at his fingers and toes. Parts of them had been amputated.
Eddie suffered from Buerger’s disease, or thromboangiitis obliterans, an illness that causes clotting and inflammation of the blood vessels of the hands and feet. Considered an “orphan” disease because of its relative rarity, Buerger’s disease compromises the blood supply to a patient’s fingers and toes. Eventually these patients, who are usually men in their 20s to 40s who smoke, develop excruciating pain, severe ulcerations and gangrene. And more often than not, they must undergo progressively higher amputations….
Minutes later I began to receive replies, including this one from @achronicdose:
Knowledge from patient-peers thru social media *can* mean more helpful talks w/ dr; dr. p.o.v. helpful for patients to read.
Doctor or patient, you are never alone in the twitterverse or blogosphere; there is always someone who is willing to offer some help or lend some support. It’s a world that I think might have made all the difference for a patient like Eddie.
Join the discussion on the Well blog, When Your Doctor Is on Twitter.
See entire article in the June 11 issue…http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/11/health/11chen.html
Filed under: Medicine & Humanities | Tagged: comm, Web 2.0
