Doctors tweet plastic surgery operation
It could only happen in America. This story from the Miami Herald tells of how a doctor has used twitter to send families regular updates during a plastic surgery operation:
In the waiting room, the patient’s family members circled a Blackberry. About every 15 minutes, Dr. Carlos Wolf of Miami Plastic Surgery gave them a few keystrokes of information about how the patient was doing.
“M is asleep,” one of Wolf’s nurses typed at 9:13 a.m. on June 3. “We will start surgery soon.”
Less than an hour later, the nose job was complete.
“Beautiful,” the nurse typed. “She’s going to love it.”
From the Miami Herald
Although this may seem absurd, the use of social networking tools is now commonplace in personal circles and businesses are starting to take note. Over the last 6 months we have seen an explosion in professional networking and knowledge share sites, meaning it is quicker and easier to get in touch and share information.
The example in the article later goes on to describe how surgeons used Twitter to report the account of an operation to remove a kidney tumour, and how anyone with web access could tune in to a webcast to watch a knee ligament being repaired live.
These are all great advances and examples of people using the technology well to further professional learning. Here at Medical Educator it’s what we are good at, our niche is medical students.
Has anyone else got any good examples of how web 2.0 has helped their professional lives? We’d love to hear your comments.