Much has been written about educating patients. This can be in the form of educational
materials provided during the office visit, providing access to accurate online
medical data, or even educating patients about wellness- how to be well, stay
well and live well. As physicians, I
believe that part of our responsibility is to teach. As the familiar adage from residency goes:
“see one, do one, teach one” – we have a responsibility to teach patients and
to teach each other.
This is why social media is so crucial to the development of
medicine today. With forums such as
Twitter, physicians can communicate real time with each other to discuss
current practices and share experiences.
To me, this is invaluable in a time where the amount of useful
information is inversely proportional to the amount of actual information
available. Many of us utilize resources
such as Up To Date, which offers textbooks and articles that we can pore
through to find the answers we need. But suppose we are outside of the confines
of residency, cowboys alone in the “field”, and want to discuss how long a
patient should take steroids after being discharged from the hospital for
ITP. Certainly we could read the
textbooks or look this up on Epocrates.
But it is also just as certain that practices would vary from physician
to physician, hematologist to hematologist.
What if you send a tweet out to the medical community and get several
real time opinions? This also presents a
wonderful opportunity to keep current, to see what everyone out there is doing
and thinking. It’s how we as physicians
operate best, in our own lingo with other physicians, sharing stories and
inspiring each other to learn and grow:
seeing one, doing one and teaching one.
The same philosophy applies to teaching patients. The extra five minutes it takes to explain to
someone why it is important to lower their cholesterol not only influences how
likely they are to listen, but how likely they are to return to the office. If patients feel respected, which is what
happens when we take the time to explain things, they remember the encounter as
a positive experience and I believe are more likely to return and to take our
advice.
As the world of medicine becomes more connected through
electronic medical records and sharing of data, I believe it is important that
we as individual physicians stay up to date and present in this realm. It is human nature to be reluctant to
change. This is precisely why
physicians, as accumulators of information and trusted leaders in the
community, need to lead the way.
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