Does Social Media Advance Medical Knowledge?

According to a recent paper, the answer is absolutely! A survey was distributed via email to a random sample of 1695 practicing physicians in the United States in March 2011 with responses from 485 physicians (28.61%). Rather than rehashing what was said, I quote from the abstract, Overall, 117 of 485 (24.1%) of respondents used social media daily or many times daily to scan or explore medical information, whereas 69 of 485 (14.2%) contributed new information via social media on a dai…

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Why Does Medical Science Keep Changing Its Mind???

I read with interest a blog post by Robert Krulwich of NPR fame on why there is so much public resistance to accept changes in truth with new scientific discoveries (some of which was new to even me)... 1) Triceratops with their beautifully placed 3 horns is actually the teenage dinosaur version of the adult Torosaurus (who had ugly asymmetric horns). Now... a decision had to be made regarding which name to stick with. Ultimately, "Triceratops" won out, perhaps because of the &qu…

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