Saturday, April 25, 2009

Dr V: The Doctor-Follower Relationship


Dr V over at 33 Charts (medicine.health.socialmedia) wrote a post last week about the "doctor-follower relationship," an interesting play on words that -- in one phrase -- brings ups issues about physician bloggers and tweeters, their readers, commenters, RTers, and the new complexity about where practicing medicine stops and talking about medicine begins. Go to his post to read the whole thing, expecially the commentary. Interesting times...

Recently I received a friend request from a woman in the community where I practice... we had never met but she had read my book. Her baby it seemed was miserable and the wait for an appointment in my clinic was too long for her to bear...

As a doc I offer friendly advice to friends and neighbors when they need help with medical stuff... And why not? I have a connection with these people... So should it be different with my social network? Probably not... Strangers and transients are nothing other than that despite our sometimes-flirtatious Twitter repartee...

Okay, so regarding my screaming baby from Facebook.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great post and link...

I like the 'doctor-follower' term. One more techno bit for Roy!

-Dinah (too lazy to sign in

Bryan Vartabedian said...

Thanks for the link. Interesting that the comments on a blog post can be much more interesting than the post!!

David Bradley said...

Glad you liked my twitter bird with stethoscope. Would you mind saving it to your server and give me a credit link though rather than hotlinking it from my server?

Thanks

db