By KIM BELLARD

These are not happy times in America.

Now, I’m not thinking about the increasing cultural wars, the endless political bickering, the troubles in the Med-East or Ukraine, the looming threat of climate crisis, or the omnipresent campaigning for the November 2024 elections, although all those play a part. I’m talking about quantifiable data, from the latest World Happiness Report. It found that America has slipped out of the top 20 countries for the first time, falling to 23^rd – behind countries like Slovenia and the U.A.E. and barely ahead of Mexico or Uruguay.

Even worse, the fall in U.S. scores is primarily due to those under 30. They ranked 62^nd, versus Americans over 60, who ranked 10^th. A decade ago those were reversed. Americans aged 30-44 were ranked 42nd for their age group globally, while Americans between the ages 45-59 ranked 17^th.

It’s not solely a U.S. phenomenon. Overall, young people are now the least happy, and the report comments: “This is a big change from 2006-10, when the young were happier than those in the midlife groups, and about as happy as those aged 60 and over. For the young, the happiness drop was about three-quarters of a point, and greater for females than males.”

“I have never seen such an extreme change,” John Helliwell, an economist and a co-author of the report, told The New York Times, referring to the drop in happiness among younger people. “This has all happened in the last 10 years, and it’s mainly in the English-language countries. There isn’t this drop in the world as a whole.”

Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, director of the University of Oxford’s Wellbeing Research Center and an editor of the report, said in an interview with The Washington Post that the findings are concerning “because youth well-being and mental health is highly predictive of a whole host of subjective and objective indicators of quality of life as people age and go through the course of life.”

As a result, he emphasized: “in North America, and the U.S. in particular, youth now start lower than the adults in terms of well-being. And that’s very disconcerting, because essentially it means that they’re at the level of their midlife crisis today and obviously begs the question of what’s next for them?”

Gen Z is having a mid-life crisis.

The researchers speculate that social media, political polarization, and economic inequality between generations contribute to the low scores for younger Americans. Jon Clifton, CEO of Gallup, believes: “Young people have more social interactions, but feel more lonely,” and that they aren’t as connected to their job, churches, or other institutions.

“One factor, which we’re all thinking about, is social media,” Dr. Robert Waldinger, the director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, said in a NYT interview,. “Because there’s been some research that shows that depending on how we use social media, it lowers well-being, it increases rates of depression and anxiety, particularly among young girls and women, teenage girls.”

Others note the impact of the pandemic. Professor De Neve said: “general negative trend for youth well-being in the United States [was] exacerbated during covid, and youth in the U.S. have not recovered from the drop.” Similarly, Lorenzo Norris, an associate professor of psychiatry at George Washington University, who was not part of the World Happiness study, told NYT:

The literature is clear in practice — the effect that this had on socialization, pro-social behavior, if you will, and the ability for people to feel connected and have a community. Many of the things that would have normally taken place for people, particularly high school young adults, did not take place. And that is still occurring.

“It’s a very complex time for youth, with lots of pressures and a lot of demands for their attention,” Professor De Neve diplomatically observed.  It was not true in all countries that younger people were the unhappiest, and Professor De Neve suggests: “I think we can try and dig into why the U.S. is coming down in terms of wellbeing and mental health, but we should also try and learn from what, say, Lithuania is doing well.”

Did you ever expect Lithuania might be a role model for our young people?

Professor Helliwell told CNN that young people are reflecting what is going on around them: “Almost whatever institution you’re in, people in North America seem to be fighting over rights, responsibilities and who should be doing what to improve things and who is to blame for things not going well in the past.”

Amidst all the gloomy findings, the report did say: “The COVID crisis led to a worldwide increase in the proportion of people who have helped others in need. This increase in benevolence has been large for all generations, but especially so for those born since 1980, who are even more likely than earlier generations to help others in need.” They may be less happy, but Gen Z and millennials aren’t less charitable.

So there’s that.

Honestly, if young people aren’t depressed, they’re not paying attention. Social media is dominating their lives, whether Instagram is making them feel depressed or TikTok is driving them to harmful mental health content. They can see the impacts of climate change but not any sign that their elders plan to do anything about it. Their jobs are neither satisfying nor economically viable enough to allow them to build wealth, especially when suffering from crushing student loans. They don’t expect Social Security to help with their retirement, whenever that may be and whatever that might look like. They have no reason to think that the largely geriatric politicians understand them or their needs.

And when it comes to health care, they can see the attacks on women’s health, the inadequate support for mental health, and the gap in technology versus in the rest of their lives.

They have every reason not to be happy. 

The thing about mid-life crises is that they’re supposed to happen, you know, mid-life. Youth is supposed to be a time of optimism and exploration, of wanting to change the world. If current youth is already unhappy, we can’t assume they will grow happier, like those of us over 60 seem to have. This is the America we’re bequeathing them; the question is, are we OK with that?

Maybe a trip to Lithuania isn’t a bad idea after all.

Kim is a former emarketing exec at a major Blues plan, editor of the late & lamented Tincture.io, and now regular THCB contributor

Here are two social media events that prove something or other.

First, a person on Facebook made the following request of a group of patient advocates:

I’m wondering if I can crowdsource a request here. For those of you who have journal article access, is anyone willing to retrieve a copy of this article from the Joint Commission Journal of Quality and Patient Safety? The medical library I have access to doesn’t subscribe to this journal. If you can obtain a PDF copy, please email it to me at [email] – Thanks!! More than happy to return the favor some time!

Within minutes, she posted:

That was quick! I love Facebook for this kind of thing!

In a private note to me, she said:

Journals clinging to the subscription model are easily disrupted by connected e-patients. I have often provided journal articles to countless patients and advocates and obtained them when my own library doesn’t have a journal for some reason. Don’t tell!

Meanwhile, up in Edmonton, Alberta, the Dean of the University of Alberta’s Medical School found himself in trouble for possible plagiarism:

Students publicly complained on the weekend about Dr. Philip Baker’s after-dinner speech to the graduates Friday night. They said the speech bore a strong resemblance to one given in 2010 by Dr. Atul Gawande at Stanford University in California.

Some students said they searched the speech on smartphones and were able to follow along as Baker spoke to them.

The world has become instantaneous.

Paul Levy is the former President and CEO of Beth Israel Deconess Medical Center in Boston. For the past five years he blogged about his experiences in an online journal, Running a Hospital. He now writes as an advocate for patient-centered care, eliminating preventable harm, transparency of clinical outcomes, and front-line driven process improvement at Not Running a Hospital.

Every Sunday, I read the Sunday NYT in search of ideas for a blog. Today is no exception. I found the idea in Thomas Friedman’s column, “The New IT Revolution,” in which he holds forth as follows,

“The latest phase in the IT revolution is being driven by the convergence of social media- Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Groupon, Zynga- with the proliferation of cheap wireless connectivity and Web-enabled smart phones and “the cloud” – those enormous server farms that hold and constantly update thousands of software applications, which are then downloaded (as if from a cloud) to make them into incredibly powerful devices that can perform myriad tasks.”

The SOCIAL Acronym

Friedman then goes on to quote Marc Benioff, founder of Salesforce.com, who describes this phase of the IT revolution with the acronym SOCIAL.

• S is for Speed – This means physicians and patients can find anything and everything about health care (and each other),

. O is for Open – This means physicians are out in the open and can no longer hide their results or reputation.

• C is for Collaboration – This means physicians must organize among themselves or affiliated hospitals or into loosely coupled teams to take on the new challenges posed by society in general and health reform in particular.

• I is for Individuals – This means anyone – physicians, patients, and entreprenuers – as individuals can reach around the globe to start something or collaborate or consolidate to improve care – faster, deeper, and cheaper – as individuals.

• A is for Alignment – physicians with each other or with supportive health organizations to make sure all your ships are sailing in the same direction.

• L is for Leadership – This means physician leaders are going to have to mixs top-down and bottom-up forces – from public and private sectors – to provide what is best for themselves, patients, and society.

The Effect of SOCIAL Forces

SOCIAL forces will make it easier for physicians to become entrepreneurs and to have access the infrastructure and the capital necessary for true innovation and entrepreneurship.

SOCIAL requires that money and social capital be available from government programs, sparked by CMS initiatives such as the Innovation Advisors Program; from nonprofit organizations such as the Physician Foundation, which has provided over $20 million in grants to over 40 physician and social organizations; and from risk-taking private venture capital organization, from Silicon Valley and elsewhere, which demand profits for investors to survive and thrive.

Richard L. Reece is a retired pathologist and the author of The Health Reform Maze: A Blueprint for Physician Practices. He blogs about health reform, medical innovation, and physician practices at medinnovationblog.

From CurrentMedicine.TV:

With the troubles at the medical doctor social network Sermo, we thought it would be interesting to speak with a healthcare IT venture capitalist about the reasons why the healthcare sector has not adopted Internet technologies such as LinkedIn or Facebook, or other IT business models. We interviewed Bijan Salehizadeh, MD, Managing Director at Navimed Capital in Washington, DC.

A cell phone snap of an California Emergency Room physician reacting to the death of a young patient in his care went viral on Reddit after a EMT posted the picture to the social media site on Friday.

As government involvement in U.S. health care deepens—through the Affordable Care Act, Meaningful Use, and the continued revisions and expansions of Medicaid and Medicare—the politically electric watchword is “socialism.”

Online, of course, social media is not a latent communist threat, but rather the most popular destination for internet users around the world.

People, whether out of fear for being left behind, or simply tickled by the ease with which they can publicize their lives, have been sharing every element of their public (and very often, their private) lives with ever-increasing zeal. Pictures, videos, by-the-minute commentary and updates, idle musings, blogs—the means by which people broadcast themselves are as numerous and diverse as sites on the web itself.

Even as the public decries government spying programs and panics at the news of the latest massive data-breach, the daily traffic to sites like Facebook and Twitter—especially through mobile devices—not only stays high, but continues to grow. These sites are designed around users volunteering personal information, from work and education information, to preferences in music, movies, politics, and even romantic partners.

So why not health data?

The latest fad asserting itself in the internet of things—that is, the wide world of wireless devices which, to whatever extent, incorporate internet connectivity for one reason or another. Digital meters are broadcasting residential utility usage; cameras use GPS to help photographers document where photos are taken; cars are learning when and where they are likely to need refueling.

Now, wearable technology like watches, ankle-bracelets, and similarly low-profile accessories are integrating apps to measure everything from how many miles a wearer has walked (with GPS-guided precision), to how a user’s heart-rate and blood pressure fluctuate over time.

How much longer until we see these apps and devices being networked into the places where that information can be put to the greatest use: doctors’ offices?

The mistake currently made in the wearable technology market is assuming that the wearer is the best person with whom to share all the valuable information these devices measure and record.

For any given early-adopter of such technology, the application of such data is more of a novelty than a life-saver. Critics of wearable health-tech have pointed out as much; knowing precisely how high their too-high blood pressure is doesn’t provide any additional motivation to change aggravating behavior, and so on.

While well-intentioned consumers snatch up fashionable, phone-syncing pedometers and sleep-trackers, there is no associated benefit other than a moderate uptick in awareness of such statistics. Before these devices go the way of the Walkman, their greater potential deserves a shot at making them ubiquitous in modern healthcare.

The Facebook model for utilizing all of the various data being offered up by its billions of users offers a limited glimpse into what social-media sharing could do for health data. Facebook combines expressed user interests, with a history clicks and views, to better target content (and advertisements) likely to be of interest to users.

Does someone tend to click more often on stories featuring cute animals? That user is going to see those stories in their news feed more often. Did that user click on a web-ad for ironic t-shirts? Start loading the virtual shirt cannon, because Facebook knows, cares, and has a whole host of additional ads for that behavior.

This kind of application for Big Data has historically been a commercial exercise; targeting ads increases sales conversions, because the ads are smarter. Healthcare needs the same kind of targeted approach to overcome obstacles like regional variances in cost, medication, and even access. The technology is already available; what is missing is a drive to actually take advantage of it to prove its merits.

The oversharing trend does not have to be a solely social act, nor an overwhelmingly banal one; sharing pertinent information with care professionals—as automatically and unconsciously as people are already “tweeting” nothings to one another—could be a boon to emerging healthcare technology and data aggregation.

Direct sharing, to, say, a primary care physician, has merit on an individual basis. Providing accurate baseline measures for key health indicators would virtually eliminate the need for more invasive tests and studies by seamlessly measuring and reporting such metrics around the clock—attentive doctors (or better yet, systems for monitoring such data) could very well identify a problem before the patient.

Preventative medicine indeed.

Scaled to a population, the benefits are even more numerous and potentially powerful. Rather than a single doctor helping a single patient prevent the onset and worsening of an illness, suddenly a whole cross-section can be tracked to identify outbreaks (like the trans-national Ebola crisis of 2014), more precisely identify group risk-behavior (like a disregard for hand-washing), and improve care-access through a hyper-specific, need-based approach (a specialty clinic for geriatric care in a remote area may in fact be the missing link in the community’s overall health system).

When University of Cincinnati Health Informatics Professor Victoria Wangia decided to research the potential for Big Data (through the use of Geographic Information Systems, or GIS) to improve prescription medication use research,  the study showed a gaping void of application. The science and the systems exist, the study found, yet collaboration between health scientists and GIS professionals to implement this technology were scarce.

The President’s Precision Health Initiative is built on the idea that volunteers will donate their DNA to a massive database and allow scientists to better analyze and target vulnerable genes responsible for diseases like cancer. This is building on the existing notion that personalized medicine—accounting for the genetics of patients—will drive cutting-edge treatments to be developed.

While a genetically-engineered cure for cancer certainly sounds impressive, the fact is that this initiative is making a leap to new (and even undeveloped) technology before fully integrating existing systems. Both the collective behavior of social sharing, and the technology for analyzing and interpreting social data, are already widely in place. As Dr. Wangia pointed bout, the trick is to actually merge the two—which does not necessitate a whole new system.

Edgar T. Wilson is a healthcare and policy analyst.

In the past few years, the fortunate among us have recognised the hazards of living with an overabundance of food (obesity, diabetes) and have started to change our diets. But most of us do not yet understand that Facebook is to the mind what sugar is to the body. Facebook feed is easy to digest. It has made it easy to consume small bites of trivial matter, tidbits that don’t really concern our lives and don’t require thinking. That’s why we experience almost no saturation. Unlike reading books and long magazine articles (which require thinking), we can swallow limitless quantities of photos and status updates, which are bright-coloured candies for the mind. Sadly, we are still far away from beginning to recognise how toxic Facebook can be.

Facebook misleads. Take the following event (borrowed from a Facebook friend). A bloke you knew in high school, whom you’ve not met or spoken to in real life since you left high school, has got married. He posts pictures of his wedding taken by a snazzy professional photographer. The pictures gather hundreds of likes and comments. Your friends shower your high school mate with congratulations. There are discussions about the bride’s dress, the tasty food, the fancy hotel, but absolutely no one knows that the reason they are really getting married is because the bride is pregnant with your mate’s baby. Facebook leads us to walk around with the completely wrong idea about our friends’ lives. So holiday pictures are over-liked. Stressful outbursts go unshared. A new job is immediately updated. Being fired is never made note of. Your friends might subscribe to a lot of “Causes”. In real life they do nothing about those causes.

We are not rational enough to be exposed to Facebook. Watching a video of your mother in a dance club is going to change your attitude towards your parents, regardless of your real relationship with them. If you think you can compensate with the strength of your own inner contemplation, you are wrong. Bankers and investors – who have powerful incentives to keep you hooked so that Facebook can make a profit – have shown that they cannot. The only solution: cut yourself off from using Facebook entirely.

Facebook is irrelevant. Out of the approximately 10,000 status updates, links or photos that you have accessed on Facebook in the last 12 months, name one that – because you consumed it – allowed you to make a better decision about a serious matter affecting your life, your career or your business. The point is: the consumption of the “feed” is irrelevant to you. But people find it very difficult to recognise what’s relevant. It’s much easier to recognise what’s new. The relevant versus the new is the fundamental battle of the current age. Facebook wants you to believe that using Facebook Home will make your life better. Many fall for that. We get anxious when we’re cut off from the flow of the news feed. In reality, Facebook consumption is a competitive disadvantage. The less time you spend on Facebook, the bigger the advantage you have.

Facebook has no real power. Notifications are bubbles popping on the surface of the real world. Will accumulating facts about your friends help you understand what is happening in their life? Sadly, no. The relationship is inverted. The important stories are not shared on Facebook: people are actually desperately alone. The more “factoids” you digest about your friend, the less alone you think you will feel. But if more information about your friends leads to happiness, we’d expect Facebook users with the most friends to be at the top of the pyramid. That’s not the case.

Facebook is toxic to your body. It constantly triggers the limbic system. New pictures on Facebook spur the release of cascades of glucocorticoid (cortisol). This deregulates your immune system and inhibits the release of growth hormones. In other words, your body finds itself in a state of chronic stress even though you are feeling good. High glucocorticoid levels cause impaired digestion, lack of growth (cell, hair, bone), nervousness and susceptibility to infections. The other potential side-effects include fear, aggression, tunnel-vision and desensitisation.

Facebook increases cognitive errors. Facebook feeds the mother of all cognitive errors: confirmation bias. In the words of Warren Buffett: “What the human being is best at doing is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact.” Links your similar minded friends share exacerbates this flaw. We become prone to overconfidence, take stupid risks and misjudge opportunities. It also exacerbates another cognitive error: the story bias. Our brains crave stories that “make sense” – even if they don’t correspond to reality. Any of your friend who writes, “Terrorists should be bombed” or “Cut the rapists penises” is an idiot. I am fed up with this cheap way of “solving” the world’s problems.

Facebook inhibits thinking. Thinking requires concentration. Concentration requires uninterrupted time. Facebook notifications are specifically engineered to interrupt you. They are like viruses that steal attention for their own purposes. Cute cat pictures makes us shallow thinkers. But it’s worse than that. Facebook severely affects memory. There are two types of memory. Long-range memory’s capacity is nearly infinite, but working memory is limited to a certain amount of slippery data. The path from short-term to long-term memory is a choke-point in the brain, but anything you want to understand must pass through it. If this passageway is disrupted, nothing gets through. Because Facebook disrupts concentration, it weakens comprehension. Friends who share too much have an even worse impact. Why? Because whenever a link appears, your brain has to at least make the choice not to click, which in itself is distracting. Facebook is an intentional interruption system.

Facebook works like a drug. As stories develop, we want to know how they continue. With hundreds of your friends’ storylines in our heads, this craving is increasingly compelling and hard to ignore. Scientists used to think that the dense connections formed among the 100 billion neurons inside our skulls were largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood. Today we know that this is not the case. Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. The more time we spend on Facebook, the more we exercise the neural circuits devoted to skimming and multitasking while ignoring those used for reading deeply and thinking with profound focus. Most Facebook users – even if they used to be avid book readers – have lost the ability to absorb lengthy articles or books. After four, five pages they get tired, their concentration vanishes, they become restless. It’s not because they got older or their schedules became more onerous. It’s because the physical structure of their brains has changed.

Facebook wastes time. If you check Facebook for 15 minutes each morning, then check it again for 15 minutes during lunch and 15 minutes before you go to bed, then add five minutes here and there when you’re at work, then count distraction and refocusing time, you will lose at least half a day every week. Good Instagram pictures are no longer a scarce commodity. But attention is. You are not that irresponsible with your money, reputation or health. Why give away your mind?

Facebook makes us passive. Facebook status updates are overwhelmingly about things you cannot influence. The daily repetition of notifications about things we can’t act upon makes us passive. It grinds us down until we adopt a worldview that is pessimistic, desensitised, sarcastic and fatalistic. The scientific term is “learned helplessness”. It’s a bit of a stretch, but I would not be surprised if Facebook use, at least partially contributes to the widespread disease of depression.

Facebook kills creativity. I don’t know a single truly creative mind who is a Facebook addict – not a writer, not a composer, mathematician, physician, scientist, musician, designer, architect or painter. On the other hand, I know a bunch of viciously uncreative minds who consume Facebook like drugs.

Society needs social cohesion — but in a different way. Meeting friends in pub is almost always fun. We need people to spend time together in real life rather than in front of screens. Only then can we have meaningful relationships.

Deleting your Facebook profile is not easy, but it’s worth it.

This write-up is an almost copy of this article with some relevant changes, in case you hadn’t realised. It seems news is not as bad as Facebook, after all.

Akshat Rathi is a science and tech writer, among other things, whose work has appeared in publications like The Economist and Ars Technica. You can follow him at his personal website, akshatrathi.com, or on Twitter at @AkshatRathi. This post originally appeared on Medium.com on April 16, 2013.

Most physicians agree that we have an ethical obligation to help educate our patients about what’s going on with their health, but what does that look like in a world overwhelmed with digital health information? And how do we budget appropriate time when we’re already struggling to balance shorter appointment times, more documentation requirements and busier clinic schedules?

It’s estimated that 72 percent of patients get a majority of their health information online. With an abundance of biased and incorrect information on the internet, our responsibility as physicians has evolved from simply teaching patients about their health conditions to now include educating patients on where and how to find and identify reliable health information.

This premise goes back to why I use social media. We have a responsibility to share, or at the very least be cognizant of, reliable health information in the realm where our patients seek it. In the olden days that looked like an exam room; today it looks like a Google search.

Here are four ways to efficiently help ensure patients have the resources they need to find reliable health information, despite cramped clinic visits and time constraints.

• Ask: How can you possibly know where patients find their information if you don’t ask? I have patients come in with birth plans all the time and quite frequently they’ve printed them out from a website with little-to-no additional research into the (often very specific) things they’ve requested. You can’t possibly know or understand their views unless you ask.
• Take 2: I understand how limited our time is. I’m a resident with a busy clinic and short, often over-booked appointment slots, but taking two minutes to discuss reliable health information with your patients has great potential for improving patient care and decreasing un-needed visits and calls.
• Prep: Have pre-written, condition-specific information for your patients and include curated links to additional reliable information for those who may want it. It’s as simple as a “dot-phrase” on most major EMR systems or a copy/paste file you can quickly email or print.
• Encourage: Encourage your patients to take control of their health by being informed. Encourage them to ask questions and explain things back to you, so you’re certain they have a grasp on it. Encourage them to share what they’ve learned in their searches.
  
  Danielle Jones, MD is a a fellow of The American Resident Project, where this post first appeared. Danielle  went to college at Texas A&M University (Gig ‘Em Aggies!) and completed her medical school at Texas Tech. Dr. Jones is interested in fertility medicine, social media and health technology. Currently, Dr. Jones is an Ob/Gyn resident in Texas, where she lives with her husband, twin baby girls and three crazy dogs

The American Society of Clinical Oncology recently made public nearly all of the abstracts — more than 5,000 pieces of research — that were selected for the ASCO annual meeting, which kicked off in Chicago on the last day of May.

Sifting through those 5,000 abstracts would be an almost inhuman task: each abstract contains 2,000 characters. That’s 10 million characters of information about oncology created by experts that’s now available for the public to parse.

But as remarkable as the ASCO abstract drop is, that research is not the only overwhelming trove of communication on cancer created by doctors. One ASCO abstract (based on research by me and W2O colleagues Greg Matthews and Kayla Rodriguez) tells story of how, over the course of 2013, U.S. doctors tweeted about cancer 82,383 times. At 140 characters a tweet, that’s nearly 12 million characters.

We know there were 82,383 tweets because we counted them. Using our MDigitalLife database, which matches Twitter handles with verified profiles from the government’s physician database, we scanned all tweets by doctors for mentions of dozens of keywords associated with cancer over the course of calendar year 2013.

Now, we haven’t read all the tweets, a task (from a word-count point of view) that would be equivalent to polishing off the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy, and then devouring War and Peace. But we’ve looked broadly at who was talking on Twitter, what they were talking about, and when they were talking.

When it comes to the topics covered, the headline was pretty clear: breast cancer remains king. About 26 percent of all physician tweets about cancer dealt with breast cancer, a figure that almost equaled the combined discussion of lung cancer, colon cancer, prostate cancer and lymphoma — the #1, #2, #4 and #5 cancer killers.

This matches what we found last year in the Social Oncology Project, which looked at all public digital conversations — physician and otherwise — and found that breast cancer had outsized impact.

That’s not entirely surprising — the much larger public conversation about cancer is similarly disproportionate — but it does reflect the way that the conversation among professionals tracks the broader conversation. While it’s no surprise that tweets about cancer from physicians spike during the ASCO meeting, it’s not entirely intuitive that awareness months would be a key draw for physicians.

Even among those 80,000-plus tweets, you can see a clear spike for breast cancer awareness month. And it’s not just BCAM. Daily prostate cancer tweets from physicians jump by nearly 30 percent in September, during prostate cancer awareness month.

Those are the broad strokes, and, if the devil is in the details, there are a great many devils luring in 82,383 mini-missives. The word “price” comes up a couple hundred times. “Cost” is mentioned nearly 1,600 times. “Expensive” plays a role in 150 or so tweets. We have a lot of work to do in understanding those thoughts (and others), but it’s clear that it will make for interesting source material.

To be sure, Twitter is not a crystal ball. The 140-character limit no doubt scares some docs away, and it strips from others the ability to make nuanced arguments. There’s a reason that medical journals don’t publish on Twitter and why the Food and Drug Administration appears to take a dim view of marketing in a character-count world.

Still, there are treasures to be dug up in a million-word trove of tweets, created by 4,000 diverse professionals, and we’re excited to have the opportunity.

Brian Reid is director of W2O Group, a marketing and communications consulting firm.

By ROB LAMBERTS, MD

My 87 year-old father broke his hip this past weekend.  He was in Michigan for a party for his 101 year-old sister, and fell as he tried to put away her wheelchair.  The good news is that he’s otherwise pretty healthy, so he should do fine.

Still, getting old sucks.

During the whole situation around his injury, surgery, and upcoming recovery, one thing became very clear: technology can really make things much easier:

• I communicated with all of my siblings about what was going on and gave my “doctor’s perspective” to them via email.
• I updated friends and other family members via Facebook.
• I have used social media to communicate cousins about what is going to happen after he’s discharged from the hospital and coordinate our plans.

All in all, tech has really made things much easier.