Doctors & Social Media
- Claudia Pérez
- 16 feb 2020
- 1 Min. de lectura
Actualizado: 27 feb 2020
It is common knowledge that nowadays our society is ruled by social media. But taken to an extreme things may get out of hand. Lately it has been very common to find doctors and nurses posting health information on the popular social media platform TikTok. TikTok videos can be a good way of providing health advice and information to teenagers and young adults. However, there have been some US doctors and nurses accused of being unprofessional and spreading misinformation.
In my opinion, as a viewer it is very difficult to distinguish what it’s true from what it’s not, specially when it’s an alleged doctor who gives you the information. Even though most of these videos made by doctors are accurate and professional, others can negatively affect public health and public opinion of the medical profession.
So, what do you think? Should doctors be active or social media or not? Do you consider unprofessional a doctor who gives advice on social media? Or do you think that it is a good way to approach medical knowledge to teenagers and young adults?
https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-51149991
All in all, I think we all agree to the fact that it is beneficial for our society to have access to medical information online. Doctors try their best to reach out and inform as many people as they can and nowadays the best way to do so is on social media. However, it’s our responsibility to learn how to distinguish what it's true from what it's not, and how to be a little bit more skeptical when it comes to social media, because as we all know there will always be fake news running around the internet.
I agree with you, it is very difficult to know if the content that these doctors share is true or false. It is very common that if someone has many followers, we think that this is why he has credibility. In my opinion we should consider better all the information that is given to us in social networks and be a bit more skeptical.
Michael Berger:
I personally think that doctors should be given a chance to give their opinion on social media openly as well as other people can do. The problem comes when another person isn't able to distinguish what's logic or what's completely fithful from what's not. We have to start judging what we read or see on tv because not everything is real. It is very easy to manipulate everythimg from behind the social media. It is ok for a doctor to give his opinion but it's our decission to believe it or not. Anyway, social media doesnt always give you the truth. As we can see with the doctor who discovered the coronavirus, he got arrested by the police…
Being on social media as a public figure is hard enough on its own, but being a medical professional on social media is even harder. So I'm not surprised that medical professionals who are just getting into social media are already making some mistakes. When you post a video on social media where millions of people can see it, you lose the ability to explain yourself to everyone watching it what you meant. Some people can misunderstand what the Tiktoker says. (Remember that each TikTok only lasts about 15/30 seconds.)
Some doctors do bad TikToks and others who do it well, so we don't have to blindly trust what they tell us, better to investigate about it to know if…