Your Doctor in a Twitter

If you are not familiar with online social networking sites like Facebook, Friends Reunited and Twitter, this may come as a bit of a shock. Most people use these sites to contact their friends and post photos of themselves and information about what they are doing. However, it now emerges that doctors in the US are also using them to find information about difficult cases.

If they get a patient with symptoms that confuse them, or they haven’t seen before, then they are asking questions on the web of other doctors in the hope they can help. Sounds sensible, but given the way that such sites are vulnerable to invasion and piracy I am not sure I want my doctor asking an unknown faceless person on the web what he thinks of my rash. Given the way people hide behind false identities on the web, they may not be talking to other doctors at all.