So, it’s another week and I decided to take a step back and think about why I started this blog…

Well, I am quite possibly slightly addicted to social media, spending hours seeing what friends and strangers are up to on facebook, watching ridiculous videos on youtube, and learning innumerable pointless facts from twitter feeds.

I’m also passionate about health systems, believing that a quality healthcare system is a basic right that should be available to anyone in need, rather than just those with a load of cash.

One day I was killing time looking at website designs for my department and stumbled across the social media in health and medicine course at UBC. I couldn’t believe that there was a course that could combine two of my interests so well. The course promised to teach me skills in health 2.0, building wikis and working on blogs, while introducing me to a host of sites that might interest me.

So, how’s it going?

Well, I’m learning a load about a bunch of things that I’d never even heard of before (apomediation, anyone?) and being introduced to an array of sites and tools that are being used across healthcare.

I’ve been hearing about the use of social media in areas I’d never even considered.  Online gaming, which I’d filed in my brain as ‘never need to know about’, is being used in ways I’d never have suspected. Just this week it was reported that a group of online gamers have succeeded where scientists have failed for 10 years, in identifying the protein structure of an AIDS-causing (Mason-Pfizer monkey virus (M-PMV) retroviral protease) molecule using a game called Foldit. This is unbelievably groundbreaking stuff. As someone who was born the same year the term AIDS was coined, I have grown up with a hope that there might be a cure, and this finding may just lead the way. This is an fantastic demonstration of the power of social media in action!

Importantly, the course is making me look around, and realize that we’re all encountering health 2.0, all the time. Last week I got sick. I won’t go into details, but suffice to say, when I was sitting on the bathroom floor feeling like the world was going to end, I found myself googling away, taking solace from comments of others who had ‘been there, done that’. There was nothing so comforting as finding other people had survived to tell the tale.

Learning to Share

So, yes, I’m writing this blog as a course requirement, but I’m also writing it to share some of the incredible things I’ve been learning about social media in health and medicine.

As social media progresses and evolves, I think we can learn a lot about different ways to share and work with one another, unconstrained by the limitations of time and geography. As one Japanese proverb states:

None of us is as smart as all of us.