Louisville Medicine Volume 64, Issue 8 | Page 27

final exam . In our closed off world in the corner of the state , the 150 miles to the main campus seemed closer to 1500 . Because of our social media connections to our classmates and technology , our access to the faculty lectures at the main campus made it feel almost as if we were there .
Early in residency , I missed a particular afternoon didactic lecture from one of our faculty . It was a lecture that I had planned to attend and especially wanted to see . I was rotating on the medical intensive care unit , and , typically for many days , resuscitation necessarily came before education . Knowing it was the policy and practice of our program to record the lectures and place them on an online service the campus had , I went about trying to access the lecture later that week . Despite my confidence that technology would once again come to my rescue , my attempts to access the lecture were as frustrating as they were futile . The technology had simply not been developed well enough to provide for the needs of residents . One of my colleagues could have “ live tweeted ” the lecture to an audience around the globe if they had wished , using only a personal cell phone and social media account . But when it came to an institutional or professional level solution to an educational problem , we had failed to treat the underlying cause of a systemic problem .
Our profession has always taken great pride in the care of patients : the guardianship of their concerns , their wellbeing , and our honor-bound relationship . At the same time , we are also obliged to teach one another to care for patients . We teach by example and by sharing the stories that are often humbling in the lessons they have taught us . This somewhat dichotomous mandate has been protected in large part over the centuries by the insular nature of medicine . Historically , a person would have given serious pursuit to learning the profession of medicine before such stories would be shared or be otherwise accessible . Our best kept secrets and professional teachings have been guarded by the rigor required to pursue our profession , for who else besides ourselves understands the profound experience of seeing humanity lain as plainly as we are privileged to ?
Without question , we live in the most connected era in history . The last 20 years have completely altered the manner in which we communicate , and we owe a great deal of this to social media . From humble beginnings in internet chat rooms to the pioneering efforts of companies such as MySpace , Facebook , Google , Twitter , Tumblr and hundreds of others , we now have an ability to find and connect with others of like mind : this is unparalleled in human history . We have the opportunity to seek out new ideas , information , research and materials that even our most revered and formidable heroes of medical education could scarcely have fathomed . Prior to the last five years , social media has been inadequately utilized for medical education for many reasons : our culture , our often conservative natures and the sight of career-ending social media mishaps playing in front of our eyes , writ large in the traditional media . As a profession that prides itself on keen observation , we have nearly overlooked what may be one of the greatest opportunities in modern history to reduce human suffering through the education of physicians the world over .
These are not merely hindsight observations and critiques from a younger generation . It is a call for aid in developing and managing the largest paradigm shift in medical education since Osler brought teaching to the bedside . In Emergency Medicine and Critical Care Medicine , I discovered that there exist large , free , online resources for any trainee who wants to learn . Frustrated by my experience in reviewing lectures in residency and inspired by these pioneers and their movement called Free Open-Source Medical Education ( FOAMed ); I helped create the first university supported Internal Medicine FOAMed resource : Louisville Lectures . We have created a comprehensive curriculum and begun taking our faculty ’ s didactic lectures and placing them online , free of charge for anyone who wishes to learn . No matter where you are in the world , if your medical center is lacking in education on a medicine topic from an expert , they can find it on the Louisville Lectures website .
Social media in medicine is not a faceless sea of user names and Twitter handles . It allows us a personal connection with those we teach and affords us the opportunity to continue our profession ’ s ethos of extending a helping hand to colleagues in need of guidance and advice . A physician reached out to us asking for help because when he returns to his village in rural Pakistan he was overwhelmed by patients with various complaints of back pain , and needed a way to triage who could be treated , which cases might not be real , and who actually needed his limited supply of opiate pain medication . The next week we were able to publish an excellent lecture on back pain from one of our former Chief Medical Residents who is a doctor of Osteopathic Medicine , who is now on the faculty of a major regional academic medical center .
The world of medical education is evolving rapidly and the world ’ s experts in medical education are needed to support this movement and innovate with us . As ever in our profession , this path is perilous . These decisions with regard to how to best utilize social media are difficult . The opportunity is most fleeting ; if we fail to embrace this new educational paradigm , we may doom our profession to stagnation . On behalf of my generation of physicians and those who will come long after , I ask you to help us , as a profession , to view the tools of social media as an opportunity to uphold our oath : to teach our art freely , without reward and to help the care of our patients .
Dr . Burk is the Chief Medical Resident for the University of Louisville Division of Internal Medicine as well as Founder and Managing Director of LouisvilleLectures . org .
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