Post by AOJ (@OsobaseAOJ)

"But here is the positive: Social media, and the digital platforms built on it are already narrowing some of that gap in small but real ways. For instance, a well-run public health page can do more for antenatal care-seeking in a single well-crafted post than a decade of poorly funded jingles. A dentist deploying Pidgin, Hausa, Igbo or Yoruba on Tik Tok, to explain why a decaying tooth needs a clinic and not a chisel from the roadside, can save more smiles than a thousand posters in health centres that nobody visits. But every gift of this kind arrives with its own shadow.

This then leads me to the few tips I want to leave with you this morning on what you should avoid in your usage of social media, because induction day is exactly the moment to hear them, before habits harden into instinct. The first and gravest is the casual surrender of patient confidentiality. A striking wound, rare deformity, dramatic delivery, and successful surgery. All these can make compelling content, and the temptation to share them, even with faces blurred or for ‘education,’ is real. But somewhere in the oath you are about to take is a promise about confidentiality that predates Hippocrates himself. Social media has not repealed that promise; it has only multiplied the ways of breaking it, and the speed at which a breach now travels. So, always bear this in mind: That patient’s body and story belong first to the patient, not to your followers on social media platforms.

The second abuse is the collapse of the boundary between the consulting room and the comment section of an online publication. Diagnosing and prescribing from a WhatsApp group chat or X thread, arguing a clinical case in the replies of a viral post etc. are ordinarily ‘harmless’. But no matter the temptation, you must always bear this in mind: Each of these actions blurs a line that exists to protect the patient as much as the medical practitioner, and each becomes considerably harder to defend the day something goes wrong.

The third is what I might call reputational contagion. Medicine and dentistry, unlike many other professions, are trusted as a collective. A single practitioner’s poor judgement online can cause a huge reputational damage not only for them but also for the entire profession. A callous joke about a patient’s condition, a video that trades a patient’s dignity for views, or a public feud with a colleague conducted for an audience. All these rarely stay contained to that one account. They become, unfairly but predictably, evidence in the case some members of the public are always building against the entire medical and dental professions."

Segun Adeniyi, the Chairman of the Thisday Editorial Board, nailed this one.

When Doctors Become Content Creators – THISDAYLIVE https://share.google/BUynBkVLHC0Sslr2s

0 likes · 0 comments · 0 shares