Social Media and Oncology: The Past, Present, and Future of Electronic Communication Between Physician and Patient
Section snippets
E-mail is a method of patient-doctor communication that, ideally, eliminates the delays encountered with conventional mail; it has been described as an evolved hybrid between letter writing and the spoken word,2 overcoming the slow pace of the former and the impermanence of the latter. However, it is also an almost unavoidably asynchronous exchange, which, as a putative benefit, allows the healthcare provider flexibility in the time and convenience of their response, but also does not guarantee
Present
If listservs were an early method by which physicians could choose to share health information with patients who were not necessarily “theirs”, ie, not under their direct care, this broadened online exchange can now occur over a variety of contemporary platforms.
Future
The ideal intersection of interests may then be found in a considerate exchange between engaged patients and clinicians online. Sites such as PatientsLikeMe, described as “a patient-powered research network that improves lives and a real-time research platform that advances medicine”, aggregate similarly affected patients in a manner that affords them strength in numbers but whom are also ripe for study, “generat[ing] data about the real-world nature of disease that help researchers,
Acknowledgments
The authors wish to acknowledge the valuable contributions of Dr Michael Fisch and Dr Dawn Hershman to the review and revision of the manuscript.
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Cited by (0)
From the Southwest Oncology Group (SWOG) and NRG Oncology.
Conflicts of interest: none.