Are virtual communities good for our health?
BMJ 2006; 332 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.332.7547.925 (Published 20 April 2006) Cite this as: BMJ 2006;332:925All rapid responses
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Editor- The explosive increase in the health related information on
the internet and the number of health related online communities has not
only increased the awareness levels amongst common people but also helped
the healthcare professionals.
The online interactive group activities or virtual communities fall
into two major categories from a medical point of view. First is a group
of professionals who actively seek each other and share authentic
information. Professionals from one part of the world with expertise in
one particular field share their experience with people from other parts
of the world. Interaction can be purely unilateral e.g. expert review of
pathology slides and X-rays of cancer patients, or it can be bilateral
e.g. group of intensivists discussing the practices at their institutes.
These groups also provide a cheap, fast and reliable mode of sharing
relevant information or knowledge for the clinicians who often find it
difficult to spare enough time from their busy schedules to attend
conferences or courses in order to keep themselves up to date. Not to
mention the cost of these events.
Second is the group of people who run into each other online because
they share a common health problem e.g. cancer, infertility etc. They are
anxious, not necessarily well informed and most vulnerable to accept or
disperse information which is unauthenticated. I agree the information
shared in these groups can often be incorrect1 but most of these patients
are well supported in the community by virtue of their condition, others
who seek information just out of interest make it a point to discuss it
with their healthcare providers. In either case false information gets
rectified. Major benefit of these groups as rightly mentioned by Jadad et
al.2 is the extent of psychological support these groups provide to their
members in coming to terms with their illnesses by interacting with people
having similar problems. Ability to maintain complete anonymity is an
added advantage for some. Carers also benefit from these groups as much as
the patients themselves e.g. relatives of patients with schizophrenia.
Already a significant component of patient doctor interaction
involves computers and the internet and it is easy to predict a future,
not too far, where every hospital website would be a highly interactive
online community, and computers & internet will be indispensable for
an efficient health care service. With the changing clinical governance
framework it is essential that every healthcare provider has significant
working knowledge of computers and internet in order to be an efficient
part the system.
References
1.Esquivel A, Meric-Bernstam F, Bernstam EV. Accuracy and self
correction of information received from an internet breast cancer list:
content analysis. BMJ 2006; 332:939-42.
2.Alejandro R Jadad, Murray W Enkin, Sholom Glouberman, Philip Groff,
Anita Stern. Are virtual communities good for our health? BMJ 2006;
332:925-926.
Competing interests:
None declared
Competing interests: No competing interests
I appreciate the authors view about the immense benefit of virtual
health communities. They are approachable and easily accessible sources
of information where readers can share each others experiences of health,
in a method not previously possible. The vast numbers of experiences may
surely be of benefit to many readers medically and more so from the
psychosocial aspects associated to any medical condition.
However, I was wondering about the need for caution with the rapid
growth of the number of groups (according to the article, there are more
than 7000 communities on yahoo alone). In a medical world revolving
around “Evidence Based Medicine”; Are the growth of vast numbers of these
groups beneficial to readers or to the contrary become confusing?. This
is especially more relevant when expressing medical information. When
reader A promotes the benefits of drug X which a clinician does not agree
will be of any benefit for reader B with the same condition, because of
lack of evidence. This could lead to a situation where both the reader
and to a lesser extent the clinician are confused about the best treatment
available. In a profession where every consultation is moving towards
“patient centered”, the pressures on a clinician will also grow despite
all the guidelines in place.
It might be worth considering the promotion of “clinician approved”
virtual health communities where all patient experiences’ are shared with
substantial background evidence so that both the patient and the clinician
will be clear about the best medical practice. This is surely necessary
in the changing medical profession today to ease the pressures on the
clinicians but how much of this may be practical in encroaching
individuals’ freedom is debatable.
Rahul Potluri,
Medical Student,
Birmingham University,
rxp289@bham.ac.uk
Competing interests:
None declared
Competing interests: No competing interests
Human communities can be empowered using virtual space to build health
Human communities can be empowered using virtual space to build
health
We have been using virtual space to empower health professionals to
manage the information they need and to share knowledge. In Infomed, that
is the Cuban health information network, the creation and improvement of
virtual communities have been one of the main strategies in order to
manage the information pollution. If you visit our portal for example, you
can find that we have facilitated the work of health professionals in
order to create information spaces that they manage and where the
professional groups manage by themselves the information according to
goals and needs of the health programs in our context. That means that the
human communities of practice, with their experience, their relationships
have been empowered in order to share knowledge and to manage the
complexity of the information needs of such communities. At the same time,
they share with other communities their perspectives and information
selection and recommendations and use other communities views to
complement their approach.
Then , if you need information about
) We have been worked since
hypertension for example, you can visit the hypertension portal space of
Infomed (http://www.sld.cu/servicios/hta/) that is maintained by the Cuban
community of specialists with clear reference to real people and to their
teams and their institutional expressions, if you need information about
rehabilitation you can visit the virtual space of the rehabilitation
community (http://www.sld.cu/sitios/rehabilitacion/) and so on. The use of
virtual communities has been quite useful and has promoted the
appropriation of the virtual tools by health professionals without
renunciation to the way live is. I mean considering the way we normally
work. We need of course more research and we are doing that. Recently the
Journal of Medical Internet Research published an article about the
Infomed experience (Séror AC A Case Analysis of INFOMED: The Cuban
National Health Care Telecommunications Network and Portal J Med Internet
Res 2006;8(1):e1
1991 in the use of Internet for health and the promotion of virtual
communities have been essential to our strategy to use limited resources
in a goals oriented way. That explains why virtual communities have been a
very early answer to serve our professionals and users in general. Serve
yourself and serve the community.
Competing interests:
None declared
Competing interests: No competing interests