As I understand it, those issues w patients are: telling of problems or symptoms, asking directions or for consultation, talking about or possible alluding to specific personal health issues and fishing for advice. And those issues w doctors are: giving opinions or advice about what could be a specific patient problem. Obviously these issues can be diffused with qualifiers such as, “no treatment discussions are entertained” and that “no personal advice is intended” in any dialogue, etc..

But, there is much to discuss otherwise. For example, how do you feel about vitamin therapy? What is your normal practice in dealing with prescribing drugs versus life-style change? Are you active in surgical procedures? Can you discuss how you engage with a patient to make treatment decisions such Hormone Replacement Therapy or Mammograms or various cancer testing procedures? Do you discuss openly when Insurance is requiring something versus what you feel is necessary or unnecessary?

On a personal level, social media, if used by the physician would yield info about personal connections, activities, social fitness or connectedness, charity or community involvement, hobbies, interests, professional energy, in other words, is this a real person?

What is the doctor’s goal? To have an image? To be important? Or to demonstrate authentic humanness, dedication, competence, judgment, caring, even fallibility? As a patient I want to know this.

In my opinion it is necessary to continually demonstrate the importance of the patient to an increasingly skeptical world.

Recommended reading: How Doctors Think
by Groopman, MD

What if the ‘communication’ in this forum was used to educate in terms of best practices and current Standards of Care. For example, there is disparity in education of Diabetics. Could we use this Social Media space to educate patients…as a whole, about the disease and topics related to treatment of diabetes?

Personally, one of my criteria for selecting a physician is how real they are versus how much image I must deal with. And the more real, the more trust they get from me. I could go into this more deeply, but this isn’t the forum. However, I will plug an excellent book about this,
Kitchen Table Wisdom by Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen eloquently telling entertaining actual short stories of ‘really’ communicating between doctor and patient.

So, social media is ideal for establishing people-to-people and people-to-business (non-private) relationships. Beyond this and beyond social aspects take it off-line except for giving useful and honest public feedback.

That just seems like a slippery slope to me. I have the email addresses of several of my doctors, but we use them to coordinate appointments between specialists when playing phone tag just isn’t working. If I need medical advice, I’ll make an appointment or, if it’s needed urgently, make a phone call.

My doctors are great, but I don’t need to see their vacation photos and they don’t need to see mine.