TAMING THE FRONTIER:
CLEARING HEALTH MISINFORMATION ON SOCIAL MEDIA
Dylan J. Chadwick
Physicians Office Resource
Staff Writer
B
obscure niche groups establish a sense of
community one with another. However, social
media affords another potent benefit for all
working professionals: the power to dispel
myths and disinformation.
elieve half of what you read, and
half of what you see, put them
together and you get reality," goes
an old couplet, most likely cobbled
together by someone in a preinternet world. Factor in the depthless reaches
and unfathomable connectedness of the
World Wide Web and this kitschy little slice of
amateur mathematics goes askew. That's the
double-edged sword of the internet. On one
side, we're given unprecedented access to
global canon of knowledge, libraries upon
libraries worth of information and a universal
platform on which to broadcast our findings
with colleagues, relatives and even complete
strangers. But then there's the other side, the
dark underside, that reminds us that though
vast and impressive, the internet is still largely
an untempered and lawless frontier in which
anyone possessing an Ethernet cable, a
mobile data plan and a half-brained idea has a
voice, and (with the advent of social media)
even an audience.
This isn't an indictment of the internet. Not
by a long shot. As an aging Gen-Y, I too have
found myself sucked into the unending Erabbit hole of nerdy internet conversations
about scifi or of searching for quick and
budget-friendly treatments for my seasonal
allergies, and I wouldn't change a minute of
that. The internet has leveled the playing field
for all of us. Business and consumer. Teacher
and student. Physician and patient. It's given
us all a "say" and access to information that,
just decades ago, would've been nigh but
impossible to establish and, with social
media's ubiquitous rise, helped even the most
Health Information and Social Media
Social media's influence on healthcare
need not be understated. Live tweeting
medical conferences and even delicate
surgeries via pre-established "hashtags" or
consumer-rating one's trip to the oncologist
are becoming well-established online norms.
Indeed, health-centric sites that purport to
take a list of symptoms and determine a user's
ailment abound, and in an age of instant
sharing and gratification, questions, concerns
and insights into the changing healthcare
landscape float freely in the ether as quippy
articles and press releases, shared via friends
in online health communities and on news
aggregator sites.
A Pew Internet research poll from 2013,
tracking the online habits of patients, reports
that one in three Americans have used the
internet to self-diagnose their particular
health concern. This alone isn't anything
disconcerting. Working the internet in as a
patient's "health toolbox" has been a reality
for some time. However, of these Americans
who report using the internet to diagnose
themselves, only a measly 35 percent report
speaking with a physician to confirm the
diagnosis. This means that the majority of
users aren't confirming their findings with a
competent medical voice, and may in fact be
following false information.
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