Social Media And Health Care

Introduction

Social media is the broad spectrum of online communication tools used to provide channels for connecting people and thus enables them to share text, audio, photos and videos among themselves (Budd 2013). These sites show the lists of users who are socially connected with each another and allow one to see others’ actions, social connections, and interactions. The internet applications collectively termed Web 2.0, can be categorized into five groups: i)Wikipedia which are common projects, ii) Blogger, Twitter, iii) YouTube, the content communities iv) Facebook, the social network sites and v) virtual games or social worlds such as HumanSim (Balean & Truong 2011, Avci et al 2015, Denecke 2009, Hamm 2013). All these social network

Recently the usage of social media by doctors has risen dramatically from 41% in 2010 to 90% in 2011 (George et al 2013). Social media also enables the patients to communicate with their physicians and with other patients affected by similar condition and thus play a more active role in their healthcare decisions (George et al 2013). Thus, the social media has an incredible impact on patients’ and physicians. However, in medical profession, the value of privacy, confidentiality and one-on-one interaction contradicts with the openness, sharing, transparency and informality of the social media (George et al,

Thus medical professionals can easily adopt prevention programmes for the benefit of the community. (George et al 2013, …)

Drawbacks of social media

While social media serves a great educational advantage to the medical professions, at the same time carries a greater risk in terms of legal, ethical, personal, and professional aspects (Pillow 2014). Therefore, physicians and medical students using social media should pay attention to the ethical sensitivity in their relationships with patients (Avci 2015).

Breaches of