New York (CNN Business)Ali Raja spends his nine-hour shifts in the emergency room at Massachusetts General Hospital treating gunshot wounds, sprained ankles, heart attacks and now a growing number of coronavirus cases.
Raja, who is also the executive vice chair of Mass General’s department of emergency medicine and a Harvard Medical School assistant professor, has been using Twitter to share information about coronavirus, also known as Covid-19, including personal protective equipment for medical professionals and the importance of social distancing, to his 57,000 followers, and to learn from other medical professionals.
“Right now, Twitter is the best way to get medical information out,” Rajatold CNN Business. “Because of the fact that everybody gets a voice [on social media], it’s very easy for alarmist messages to pick up steam. We have to be constantly vigilant about trying to get that panic under control and spread a different message.”
In a sign of the times, doctors are effectively waging a two-pronged fight against coronavirus: one part takes place in overcrowded hospitals and the other takes place on noisy social media platforms as they work to combat what the World Health Organization has declared an infodemic with accurate, authoritative voices. All of that means doctors, some of whom were once reluctant to embrace social media, are wading deeper into platforms that are rife with fake news, unproven medical advice and mass panic.
“Social media is the disease and the cure. It is responsible for the dissemination of misinformation as much as it needs to be a tool for repairing that,” said Rick Pescatore, an emergency room physician and public health expert in the Philadelphia area, who is active on Twitter and Facebook and has treated Covid-19 patients. “It’s incumbent upon physicians, who want to get real information out there, to meet these patients where they are — and that’s social media.”
Fighting coronavirus misinformation where it lives
Perhaps nowhere is this shift more striking than on TikTok, a short-form video platform beloved by teens that is best known for lip syncing, dance routines and comedy skits.
In one TikTok video viewed more than416,000 times, a registered nurse named Miki Rai does a choreographed dance involving a lot of hand motionsas facts about Covid-19 flash on the screen, such as how long the virus stays on different surfaces. In another TikTok video, set to soothing elevator music, Dr. Rose Marie Leslie demonstrates proper handwashing: Wet hands. Lather up. Start washing for 20 seconds. Scrub under your nails and between fingers. Rinse.
Leslie, a resident physician specializing in family medicine at the University of Minnesota Medical School, created a TikTok account about a year ago, with the aim of reaching a younger demographic with health education information. Soon after coronavirus cases started emerging, she began creating TikToks about the issue. Now, she works to debunk myths about the virus for her more than500,000 followers.
“People have so many questions and they’re looking at tweets or random Instagram posts that aren’t necessarily from valid sources,” Leslie said. “My real goal was to take the messaging specifically from trusted sources and get it out to the broader community and also put it in a way that’s palatable, that’s quick nuggets of information presented in a short way.”
Original Article : HERE ;
from AllAbout https://allabout.pw/doctors-turn-to-twitter-and-tiktok-to-share-coronavirus-news/
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