Social Media in Public Health

🤳🏻SOCIAL MEDIA is an stablished platform with numerous opportunities to use it in PUBLIC HEALTH 🩺

📖 This research aimed to conduct an introductory study of the existing published literature on WHY TO CHOOSE AND HOW TO USE SOCIAL MEDIA to obtain population health information and to gain knowledge about various health sectors 👩🏻‍🏫

✅ It has an impact on the RELATIONSHIP between physician and patient, PUBLIC TRUST in the system; as well as changes in various health sectors such as health interventions, BEHAVIORAL MODIFICATION AND PROMOTION, health campaigns, medical education, disease outbreak surveillance, health research, and more. 

🚫On the other hand, social media have acted as a quick platform during public emergencies for DISSEMINATING RUMORS, exposing FALSE INFORMATION and conspiracy theories, and ESCALATING FEAR AND STIGMA directed at specific people and locations. 

🔎 This analysis shows that, while social media can be a POWERFUL TOOL for the public health sector in the current digital era, there are also DRAWBACKS to consider which include potential moral, ethical, legal, and privacy violations, professional behavior concerns, compliance-related issues, and societal ramifications 🤔

🌧️NUMEROUS CHALLENGES, including authority, professionalism, confidentiality, customs, information quality, and secrecy, as well as the tremendous role that social networks play in medical and public health care, remain UNADDRESSED.

⚖️ Some major ethical issues are discussed briefly, the AMA policy about professionalism in social media use, ACP-FSMB guidelines for Online Medical Professionalism, and HIPAA social media violations are used to present certain proposed regulations and guidelines for using social media for the populations health, which may be applied for avoiding such consequences 👍🏻