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Social Media Footprint: How Concerned Should Medical Professionals Be?

Hey Docs out there! What if your patients found out about your most embarrassing moment from college? What if they saw a picture of it? I was watching and listening to one of my favorite technology shows over the weekend called “The Tech Guy” with tech journalist Leo Laporte.

In the brief video here, you’ll see the host take a call from an attending physician. The caller stated that back before medical school, he posed for PlayGirl magazine and now some of those pics are showing up on websites and the caller was trying to figure out how to have them taken down. It sounds like the pictures were taken in the pre-internet days. For the full exchange, click here and fast forward to the time 13:21hrs on the clock behind the host.

This call opened up the larger issue of Online Reputation which has been talked about in Health Care Social Media circles for a long time. But, it is interesting seeing what this non-medical tech journalist (and the caller) says about it: Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Family Medicine Rocks Blog*

A South African Surgeon Flees The Twilight Zone


We can sometimes look good in our jobs. I suppose it comes with the territory. But sometimes this is not a good thing.

Danville is an interesting place. Actually the place itself is drab but it is full of interesting people. To say it is populated by the lower echelons of the gene pool is an understatement of note. For some reason every reprobate and inbreed seems to have found their way there. Throw a few generations of fetal alcohol syndrome into the mix and you have the average Danville resident. Then add a strong predilection to grandpa (a local aspirin caffeine headache powder) to round off with. Usually when they presented to the hospital it is with a bleeding peptic ulcer or a perforated peptic ulcer. In fact they seldom present to us with anything else. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at other things amanzi*

Female Surgeon Propositioned By Patient Via Facebook

There is an interesting article in E-Health Europe about how patients try to contact doctors on Facebook, the popular social networking site, and how doctors shouldn’t respond to them. In my “Medicine and Web 2.0” university credit course, we cover this important issue several times and I try to provide students with useful pieces of advice about how to avoid such problems.

The Medical Defence Union said it was aware of a number of cases where patients have attempted to proposition doctors by sending them an unsolicited message on Facebook or similar sites.

The medical defence body said it would be “wholly inappropriate” to respond to a patient making an advance in such a way. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at ScienceRoll*

Latest Interviews

IDEA Labs: Medical Students Take The Lead In Healthcare Innovation

It’s no secret that doctors are disappointed with the way that the U.S. healthcare system is evolving. Most feel helpless about improving their work conditions or solving technical problems in patient care. Fortunately one young medical student was undeterred by the mountain of disappointment carried by his senior clinician mentors…

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How To Be A Successful Patient: Young Doctors Offer Some Advice

I am proud to be a part of the American Resident Project an initiative that promotes the writing of medical students residents and new physicians as they explore ideas for transforming American health care delivery. I recently had the opportunity to interview three of the writing fellows about how to…

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Latest Book Reviews

Book Review: Is Empathy Learned By Faking It Till It’s Real?

I m often asked to do book reviews on my blog and I rarely agree to them. This is because it takes me a long time to read a book and then if I don t enjoy it I figure the author would rather me remain silent than publish my…

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The Spirit Of The Place: Samuel Shem’s New Book May Depress You

When I was in medical school I read Samuel Shem s House Of God as a right of passage. At the time I found it to be a cynical yet eerily accurate portrayal of the underbelly of academic medicine. I gained comfort from its gallows humor and it made me…

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Eat To Save Your Life: Another Half-True Diet Book

I am hesitant to review diet books because they are so often a tangled mess of fact and fiction. Teasing out their truth from falsehood is about as exhausting as delousing a long-haired elementary school student. However after being approached by the authors’ PR agency with the promise of a…

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