Sask. doctors take to social media to dispel misinformation, promote public health measures Dr. Emily Sullivan
By Greg Basky Saskatoon family physician Dr. Emily Sullivan started posting COVID-related memes and infographics to Instagram early on in the pandemic because she saw an information gap facing people in their 20s and 30s. Dr. Sullivan, whose handle is @yxe.md, figured while people 40 and older were already well served on Facebook and Twitter by the Saskatchewan Health Authority (SHA) and the provincial government, people in her own and younger demographics were at risk of missing out. Prior to that, she hadn’t used social media as part of her work. “But I was following influencers in Saskatoon so I understood how the platform (Instagram) worked,” says Dr. Sullivan, who now has more than 13,000 followers on the image-based social media platform. “I started sharing some of my own scientific evidence-based content, along with content from the SHA, so that people who didn’t have Facebook or Twitter would see it.” For ICU physician Dr. Hassan Masri, it was a video his mother shared on social media, touting garlic and olive oil as a cure for COVID, that sparked him to start talking about the
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pandemic on Facebook. After receiving overwhelming response to his first video – done in his mother tongue, Arabic – he posted another, this time in English. Dr, Masri has been active on the platform ever since, at times sharing written and video posts several times each week. “There was a void and either you fill it up and answer (people’s questions) and help them, or they will turn to other people who may not be qualified to answer those questions,” says Dr. Masri. “It was very clear to me from the beginning that there was a real battle that was about to happen between misinformation and real scientific facts.”
Advocacy part of a physician’s job Both Dr. Masri and Dr. Sullivan consider advocacy to be part of their job as a physician. “Everyone does that in different ways,” said Dr. Sullivan, who has her master’s in public health “I felt that it (using social media) would be a fast and easy way for me to connect with the public and get information out, and help people navigate public health measures.”
