Surgeons using Twitter during surgery: creepy or cool?
Could live microblogging of serious operations become commonplace?
Imagine, for a moment, if on the eve of a potentially life-altering surgery your surgeon asks you if it would be OK that your operation be blogged in real-time for the entire world to experience. This might sound like something out of a low-budget comedy but it's not. It's actually a trend that may begin to gain popularity.
The idea behind this practice is to not only allow other doctors and students to experience an operation without standing in the operating room, but also to allow curious individuals a glimpse into the real-life dramas of a medical procedure. In the only two recorded instances of it being done, the doctors have allowed a member of their staff to use Twitter, a microblogging site where users can make 140-character mini-posts from a computer or mobile device, to bring the operation to the public.
Opinions on the practice are not hard to come by. Some find it just plain creepy, while others believe if a procedure is going as planned there really isn't anything to object to, assuming the patient has already agreed to have his or her operation made public. However, we certainly hope the posting of real-time surgery snap-shots is kept to a minimum.
This story around the web:
- Trusted sources:
Surgeons send 'tweets' from operating room -… [cnn.com]
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Surgeons Use Twitter To Perform Surgery [google.com]
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Henry Ford posts live surgery blog |… [google.com]
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Comments (1)
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Barb Dybwad
(3:28 PM on Fri Feb 20, 2009)
Creepy. Cool creepy, but still creepy. I can see how it might be a really amazing thing for someone's friends and family to get status updates assuming things are going well, but what happens if they're *not* going well? That just gets creepy fast.