Infectious disease (ID) conferences tend to rejuvenate me despite the information overload. This year, IDWeek in Washington DC was no different except for the impact of social media particularly Twitter. The last time I attended IDWeek in New Orleans ( 2016), one of the themes was gloom. We were struggling to fill ID fellowship spots. We were losing graduating ID fellows to hospitalist programs. How could we attract more students and residents to the field?
Fast forward 2019 and there was a very tangible optimism at this year’s conference. I marvelled at the throngs of young people, students and residents, in attendance, interested in a career in infectious disease. I was amazed at how many posters there were on display show-placing their work. The poster hall was humongous. I was thrilled by the ID BugBowl, in a ballroom packed to capacity on a pleasant autumnal Saturday evening. But more than that I was amused by the celebrity sightings.
I remember my first IDSA conference (2008) and my first ICAAC conference (2012) where I was wowed to be in the presence of eminent leaders seemingly perched on an unsurmountable pedestal whose research and opinions were the basis of my clinical practice. In those days, I was already a blogger but blogging in medicine was frowned upon. I blogged anyway, anonymously, my private journal, open for the world to see. In 2010, I had incorporated Twitter but was anonymously disseminating infectious disease topics being discussed in the mainstream news. Occasionally, I would tweet a little-known-fact learnt at national conferences.
Then one day, I looked around and there were ID pharmacists and then there were ID attendings and then there were ID fellows and really healthcare professionals of all sorts on Twitter, teaching, learning, forming a camaraderie across states, countries, and continents, and participating in discussions impacting national and international policies. There are no borders. Just like my life.
It was then that I found the courage, in 2016, to come out as myself, a physician, to defrock my medical musings off their anonymity, to divorce my private persona with its private blog and its private Twitter and create a stand-alone medical blog. And now, in addition to the education at ID conferences I meet in real life my Twitter friends, beaming with pride about their work, the cloak of invisibility that modern medicine throws onto us discarded, vibrant, hopeful.
Our Voices Matter
Medicine these days has moved from independent privately owned practices into larger healthcare organizations where many of us physicians find ourselves employed, another cog in the wheel, with too many administrators telling us what to think, how to practice, and interfering with the physician-patient relationship.
The leadership lacks physician engagement as we are busy toiling, buried in paperwork or lost in the maze of the electronic medical record, becoming smaller and smaller in the framework of medicine. The art and nuances that make us experts in our respective fields being made insignificant in myriad ways, often as simple as insisting on labelling us all “providers” as if we are interchangeable with nurse practitioners, pharmacists, physical therapists etc. Consequently, many of us experience burnout or moral injury as some now call it, jaundiced by our chosen profession.
Social media platforms allow us to again find our creativity and to nourish our drive for clinical thinking. They offer new opportunities to collaborate with others. Through podcasts, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter we can regain control. For too long discussions involving health, medicine and science on social media have been led by quacks and others promoting false and unproven concepts. Social media is here to stay. It’s our responsibility as physicians to address this misinformation, to advance health knowledge, and to be a trusted voice.
How to Make Twitter Work For You
- Know who you are: Define what is important to you and what your core values are. Ask yourself, what impact do I want to achieve on Twitter?
- Have a mission: Use Twitter to promote your research or to find collaborators. If you like me are not formally engaged in scientific research or academia or if you are just more comfortable being a wallflower use Twitter to elevate others. But I promise you there are many incredible connections to be made that being actively engaged is rewarding!
- Tweet with intention and with professionalism: Tweet knowing that your parents, in-laws, children, patients, bosses, religious leaders, neighbours, etc. are all reading. The code of medical ethics still applies. Remember Twitter lasts forever.
- Overall, be yourself. If you just want to lurk, fine. If you want to check-in only when there is a national conference in your field, fine. If you want to post every hour on the hour, leaving us to wonder how you get any patient care done, fine.
ID Twitter Hashtags To Start With
- Hashtag IDTwitter
- Hashtag IDDailyPearl
- Hashtag MicroRounds
- Hashtag IDMedEd
- Hashtag HIVMedEd
- Hashtag TxID: transplant ID, also hashtag TransplantID
- Hashtag MicroRounds
- Hashtag IDPath
- WUID_Qx: board style questions
- IDAgram: teaching ID one diagram at a time
I have chosen to highlight hashtags rather than specific people for ease. These can also be found in my blogroll. I have found these hashtags to be instrumental in disseminating sound infectious disease knowledge. In no time they will lead you to members of IDTwitter whose accounts you should follow.
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