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Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Doctor, Can You Please Use Twitter?

Dr. Schreiber, San Augustine County, Texas


It's the old-school doctors who love to teach, and who would never even think of using something as (seemingly) frivolous as microblogging, who really should use Twitter. Let me give an example:

I'm a soon-to-be first year medical resident, and I'm terrified. Happily, I'm taking this awesome class on how not to kill patients with medications, and the teacher is a fantastic old-school clinician; a passionate teacher, quaking with insight, and firmly committed to doing right by his patients in the face of all the competing influences on a doctor's judgment.

Central to his class is the perspective that fancy new drugs are inherently risky. Why? Because the bottom line of drug development does not enlist sufficient subjects to evaluate true safety risks until after the medication appears in advertisements on the back of medical journals.

In short, he advises to stick with the tried-and-true. He's old-school, and he's awesome.

Although the theme of this blog touts innovation, I love old-school prudence that rubs experience and evidence in the face of marketers' narrative fallacies.

Unfortunately, most old-school folks abhor trends as perfunctory as Twitter. But a voice like this clinician's is a drop in the ocean of pharmaceutical marketing. His real passion is speaking truth to marketing, but he doesn't want to speak with the voice of Twitter.

I'll let you know if I change his mind. This is Daniel Kraft, but it could be my clinician educator:

2 comments:

Bryan V said...

I'm afraid that your experience with this doc is going to die when he dies. Somehow I think that these experiences should be archived. Part of what I was getting at today on 33c.

I already see and hear medical students today who can't believe what I did as a resident.

Even this post adds to what we need to understand.

Aaron said...

Yeah, remarkable that we commented concomitantly on the same topic.

For onlookers- your 33charts post:
http://33charts.com/2012/03/repurposing-physician-knowledge.html