Are Social Media Groups the Novel Physician Lounges to Combat COVID Times?
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Medical Center Primary Care, University of Kentucky Bowling Green Campus, Bowling Green, KY, USA; 2Department of Gastroenterology, Graves Gilbert Clinic, Bowling Green, KY, USA.
J Gen Intern Med DOI: 10.1007/s11606-020-06217-y © Society of General Internal Medicine 2020
media platforms are an increasingly dominant chanS ocial nel through which physicians encounter news in their everyday life. Social media sites such as Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, and Snapchat are all powerful tools. Facebook is a platform wherein likeminded people can create groups to share their knowledge and to interact, making it a formidable force and voice. The purpose of this article is to understand the ubiquity of social media groups and their influence on physicians to treat patients with coronavirus disease 2019 [COVID-19]. In late December 2019, an outbreak of a mysterious pneumonia characterized by fever, dry cough, fatigue, and occasional gastrointestinal symptoms started in China and spread to many other countries.1 COVID-19 spread rapidly outside China and the number of affected countries, states, or territories reporting infections to WHO was 143 by March 16th 2020.2 The challenge during the pandemic is the speed required to transfer the knowledge of current best practices to the physicians. It needs to be at a pace equal to or better than the spreading epidemic. The paths for, and rate of, dissemination of traditional peer review scholarly publications, static websites, and even emails are known to be slow.3 During the SARS epidemic in 2003, worldwide Internet access was well established, yet gaining access to potential medical users was largely reliant on email contact and personal communication. In this era of public health emergency, preprint versions of the scholarly articles evolved just like social media groups to provide the speediest way to disseminate the information. Preprint versions of COVID-19 are immediately made available to the public similar to social media groups. A potential problem with preprint publications is that they are not peerreviewed. If the preprint undergoes changes during the peer review or fails to get published in the peer review journal, the
Received May 25, 2020 Accepted September 3, 2020
originally submitted article will remain in the preprint server and can distort the literature. Although preprint publications and social media groups give open access to all physicians and healthcare workers, it needs to be taken with a grain of salt. There are hundreds of Facebook public and private groups created by physicians for physicians to interact and provide expertise (Table 1). To give an example of the impact, there is a COVID-19 USA physician Facebook group with more than 150,000 members on a single platform irrespective of the specialties. The discussions had a wide array of COVID-19 topics like clinical manifestations, testing, plasma donation, mental health resources, critical care management, and personal protection equipment [PPE]. The rationale to use potential medications like h
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