Social Media Helps Breast Cancer Patients

Here's a surprise for us! Social media helps breast cancer patients.... And it took a research study to tell them that. How many of us went online for support after breast cancer to the online groups at Komen, Breastcancer.org, or many other sites in the last decade? I know I did. I also started blogging and looking for offline support services.

We've know about this for a while now. But it took a bunch of scientists a while to figure this out.

"Women who communicated online the most felt the most positive about their choices about treatment. They also said their decisions were more deliberate, and they were more satisfied with them, according to the study."

And can I add the decisions we made by asking our peers who had been through the same thing were a lot more educated than those of us who went along with what our doctors told us to do because we could hear it from our peers.

"But the findings don't prove that using social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter will benefit all breast cancer patients, and the researchers expressed a note of caution."

However the scientists still have doubts because they need more research. Me, I can tell you that I was happy when I learned to ask questions of my peers. 

""For some women, social media may be a helpful resource. But there are still questions to answer before we can rely on it as a routine part of patient care,...""

Okay the internet has changed many things including the practice of medicine and the behavior of patients. Why should this be a surprise? We go online to post pictures of our cats and to ask questions about the decisions facing us as part of our cancer treatments.