It’s often portrayed as a superficial appearance-focused social media site but Instagram has the potential to be a valuable educational medium for doctors to engage with patients and clinical peers, according to a group of NSW clinicians.
With over a billion active users every month, Instagram offers a way to exchange clinical and healthcare information particularly with younger people, according to doctors at the University of NSW and Westmead Hospital, Sydney.
If used with appropriate safeguards, Instagram can be an online resource for doctors to communicate with patients using a mix of photos, videos and written information such as in providing examples of disease cases and explanations of what patients might expect, they write in Internal Medicine Journal.
And since many patients are already sharing their medical experiences through Instagram, the involvement of clinicians can help provide more evidence-based and high quality medical content to help support patients, particularly in visually rich specialities such as dermatology, they write.
“Physicians and health organisations can disseminate health campaigns to the millions of daily users, especially as it is now more common for people to acquire news from social media outlets,” they say.
Doctors should also be aware that through the use of hashtags, many patients are already using Instagram as a kind of disease support group to share experiences and relive the psychological burden of disease by no longer feeling isolated, they add.
“Some patients may also be more inclined to seek medical review [after using Instagram] as it may appear as a more accessible and realistic option after witnessing other patients’ experiences with treatment,” they note.