Column Archive: The Pros and Cons of Sharing Medical News Online

[paul-met-debbie]

Good you picked this column up, Jenny, I also saw it last week and thought: “this is something for the forum”.

We need to examine why we post online. In case of social media like facebook, mostly this happens to casually inform our “friends” what’s up in our lives. I say “friends” because although some of those contacts are indeed friends in the true sense of the word, the large majority of those “friends” are only contacts. Friends of friends, relatives of friends, friends of relatives of friends etc. The true bond we have with those is getting thin very fast with every new step in the chain.

So, if we share simple things like “my blood test turned out well”, this is no problem. Some friends and contacts will react (sometimes) with a thumbs up or an emoticon, sometimes even with a few words – and there is not more to it, case closed. Next message will be about the cat that barfed on the carpet, with a horrible picture to prove this disaster.

But if there are more difficult messages to share, one has to be very careful to determine the way of sharing and the ones to share it with, particularly if one has an expectation or a need about a certain type of response. If there is indeed a call for help implied, or for true commitment to the situation, facebook might not be the most auspicious medium.

I was forced to make a facebook account last month to promote our video Wake up call on the facebook of a particular spiritual channel (it generated two thumbs up, what was I thinking?) And although I only have 1 facebook-friend (my sister) and am careful not to add others, I already now are beeped out of my pants with so called requests for friendship from people that I do not know of want to know. They turn out to belong to the facebook friends-Scuderia of my sister, and facebook automatically seems to go along this entire list at a rate of three per day, to sent these so called personal requests for friendship, that these people are unaware of. If one tries to answer such a request, what happens technically is that facebook sends this person a friendship request out of my name. And perhaps this person then will add me to the Scuderia, thinking it would be rude to decline the brother of his/her “friend” (which is my sister). And so people become “friends” with each other on facebook without really longing for such a relation to be established. Facebook is filled with such phony friendships and uses this to make itself important and influential.

So I can imagine, having a few hundred of these friends/contacts in facebook, being swamped with hundreds of beeps every day that turn out to be absolutely irrelevant and some even fake, that some important messages might easily go amiss for a number of reasons. Already now my reaction to a facebook beep is to delete the e-mail without even reading it. If my friends (sister) want to contact me genuinely, and it is urgent or important, they know how to find me and get my attention. I might even delete the entire facebook thing if I get annoyed by it sufficiently in the near future. We had many heartwarming reactions on our video Wake up call, and they came by e-mail mostly and on YouTube itself.

So I would never use facebook to share a medical thing that needs a real and swift reaction or an offer for help.  These communications I would do personally on the phone, or by e-mail, and not in an open system like facebook. And certainly if there is a more personal message involved, for privacy reasons alone I would not use facebook, to prevent that 90% of the recipients are practically strangers to me, way down the Christmas tree of the facebook “friendship”-structure, that I wouldn’t even trust with my handkerchief, let alone with my medical record.