A while back, I blogged about getting medical advice on Twitter. I am clearly on the fence about this one. I found an article on Cure Magazine on doctors who tweet which discusses gaps in knowledge between doctors and patients.
It is clear that there are gaps between what a doctor knows and what a patient does - that's because they went to medical school and we didn't. I think if knowledge can be shared between the two groups that is great.
However the volume of cancer information tweeted by doctors on cancer is clearly skewed. Breast cancer is the most tweeted, 19%, followed by lung cancer, 9%, which does not reflect the number of diagnoses. So if you have breast cancer you can probably find a lot of information on Twitter, particularly on the Monday #BSCM chats where a single doctor, the host, (who I follow but rarely read) generates most of the tweets.
Blah, blah, blah, this is all great. But (and you knew that was coming) I don't really care.
I mean I am on Twitter and have been on it since about 2007. But I am not a huge user. My blog generates a tweet every day and I do sometimes go read and follow and reply to tweets but not often. And I know a lot of people who are online but don't use Twitter for whatever reason either.
So go ahead and get information on Twitter if you want. But its a small number of patients and a small number of doctors who generate most of the information. I'm okay with this. I can't read every bit of information out there on my ailments and can only absorb some of it anyway (more than my brain capacity). But if you tweet and like getting information Twitter, you can.
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