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The social (media) side to rheumatology

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Abstract

A revolution is underway in the fields of education and health practice. Social media are now considered by the new generations of students, doctors and patients as a useful tool for learning and for doctor–doctor, doctor–patient and patient–patient communications. However, should we be excited by this revolution or afraid of it? Advantages and challenges of such new tools for medicine in general and rheumatology in particular are discussed in this Perspectives.

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Figure 1: Personal view on the evolution of the flow of knowledge and health information reaching patients.

Change history

  • 21 March 2014

    In the version of this article initially published online, the article incorrectly stated that the first email was sent via the World Wide Web. The error has been corrected for the HTML and PDF versions of the article.

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Correspondence to Francis Berenbaum.

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Supplementary Table 1

Example of users of Twitter interested in rheumatology* (DOCX 26 kb)

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Berenbaum, F. The social (media) side to rheumatology. Nat Rev Rheumatol 10, 314–318 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrrheum.2014.20

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