Tired of answering patient questions based on email spam? Well, these physicians are going to fight fire with fire:
For years, a message circulating on the Internet has urged women to demand a special blood test as a way to screen themselves for ovarian cancer. Doctors have dismissed the e-mail, saying the recommended test isn’t reliable . . .. . . Now Dr. Parker has decided to wage his own Internet campaign. He and two colleagues have crafted their own missive and released it onto the Internet. Their hope is that the same forces that propelled the first message to popularity can also be used to debunk it.
Again, the medical establishment is reactive rather than proactive. Which is one reason why groups like the anti-vaccination movement has the internet upper hand.
Wouldn’t it be more effective if real medical resources waged a guerrilla campaign to flood YouTube, the chat boards, and blogs with legitimate medical information?
Related posts:
- Doctors have a duty to engage in social media
- Health care myths
- Health care is not a right: The fight continues in Colorado
- Debunking health care myths
- Losing the anti-vaccine fight, and what we should do next
- Some Viagra spam actually coming from Pfizer
- Profit by genetic screening?
KevinMD.com on Facebook
{ 1 comment }
Maybe. But it’d also be helpful if “TV doctors” only gave accurate information – I’ve heard them recommend non-recommended tests more than once. It’ll also be helpful if some medical groups hadn’t tried to “sell” some non-recommended tests to public.
A while ago I mentioned a flyer I got in the mail from a radiology group offering a package deal on several tests – one was a CT scan for aortic aneurism (if I am not mistaken) – accompanied by a sales pitch on tests’ importance for symptomless public. Additionally, this year when I came to my ObGyn office, the nurse gave me a pitch on HPV test in addition to pap smear (not just if pap smear is abnormal, that I’d have understood; in addition to pap) with a paper to say “yes” or “no” since the insurance wouldn’t cover it as it is not recommended. BTW – my pap smears have always been normal. I said “no”, but I’d imagine a lot of women thought that since it was offered than it is recommended.
Comments on this entry are closed.