SOCIAL MEDIA IN ACADEMIC EM The 21st Century Scholar: An Interview with Teresa Chan, MD By Eric Lee, MD
"Start paying attention to, or at least getting comfortable with, digital scholarship because #FOAMed is getting better
SAEM PULSE | JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2018
and better."
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This month, I caught up with Teresa Chan MD (@TChanMD). Teresa is an emergency medicine physician and researcher in Hamilton, Ontario. You may know her from EM blogs such as CanadiEM and ALiEM. I reached out to Dr. Chan to talk about her recent publication entitled “Social Media and the 21st Century Scholar: How You Can Harness Social Media to Amplify Your Career.” In it, she discusses two individuals: Brent Thoma (@Brent_Thoma) and David Stukus (@AllergyKidsDoc), who skillfully used social media to help build their careers and provide readers with practical advice on how others can do the same. I was fortunate to elicit some valuable pearls of wisdom straight from the source.
or cited anything incorrectly on Twitter or in an online blog? How many seconds elapsed before the online community discovered your error and pointed it out? Start getting comfortable with digital scholarship, because #FOAMed is getting better and better. Investigators are focusing active research into qualitatively and quantitatively studying #FOAMed content, including but certainly not limited to the METRIQ Study. These inquiries will continue to bring us closer to mainstream recognition of online medical education sources. In a particularly meta development, you can now find blog posts about research studies discussing the quality of blog posts.
Know the Rules of the Game From the outset, according to Dr. Chan, you must know the rules of the game you’re playing. This means that you should understand what is recognized as academic scholarship at your shop. While more and more academic institutions are beginning to recognize the value of digital scholarship (check out Dr. Dan Cabrera at the Mayo Clinic and his work on social media and academic promotion), not all institutions share this outlook. As a junior scholar, you must be flexible. Taking a note from Dr. Chan’s playbook, you can take your series of blog posts and turn them into a peer-reviewed e-book (e.g. MEdIC), or perhaps the online conversation generated from your podcast or blog posts generates a worthwhile question that can be pursued further via traditional scholarship such as a new research study or a review paper.
Eminence-based Medicine Versus Evidencebased Medicine
"Part of why emergency
• What is the medical blog but the modern reinvention of the textbook? • What is the podcast but the modern reinvention of the lecture?
medicine physicians
It’s a well-known secret that we don’t hold textbooks to the same level of scrutiny that we do current #FOAMed. After all, when was the last time you really fact-checked any chapter in Rosen’s Emergency Medicine or Tintinalli’s Emergency Medicine textbooks? On the flip side, have you ever paraphrased
media is because we are
became pioneers in social
social people at heart." —Teresa Chan, MD