“You make a blog. Then you tweet about your blog— it’s an engine to get people to look at your blog. I’ll tweet about my blog posts and as I have more followers, they see I have a new post and they go look at it. Then they tweet about my blog posts and new people discover it. If my blog post was interesting enough to share, that person probably has interests in concert with mine, and the next thing you know, you connect with some person who’s working on something you’re working on.” Upstate pediatric infectious disease fellow Nick Bennett, MBBChir/PhD, HS ’08, began blogging in 2004, five years before the launch of Twitter. “I spent several years posting online in discussion groups, and when I realized all I was doing was cutting/pasting my answers from previous years, I quit and created the blog, which I set up as an info-portal to combat AIDS denialism, a distressing and vocal fringe movement that is obsessed with saying HIV is harmless and AIDS medications are doing more harm than good,” says Dr. Bennett.
Nick Bennett, MBBChir/PhD, HS ’08, is an active user of Twitter to discuss issues in medicine, particularly related to HIV and infectious disease.
Students in West’s Personalized Medicine course are encouraged to post on Twitter to learn the medium. Not all of them do, but one who has fully embraced the medium is third-year medical student Aaron Stupple, who as a result of the course is both a regular user of Twitter and has his own blog that explores the possibilities of technological innovation in medicine at Upstate and beyond. Stupple got started with Twitter. “It was easy to learn. The next thing you know, I was following all these other MDs. It was like, ‘Wow, there is this whole world out there of doctors talking to each other, sharing everything from recommendations on treatments to strategies for running their practice.’” Stupple, who heads the Innovate Upstate group, now spends about an hour each morning and evening reading medically-related Twitter and blogs, something he considers vital to his own medical education. “I’m not saying this is better than traditional methods, such as textbooks, but it’s a fact of life,” he says. “We’ve got to embrace this stuff or we’ll just be behind.” Stupple, who mostly writes about the things that he thinks are important for medical students, explains how it works: 16
Medical futurist Kent Bottles, MD, was a guest on HealthLink on Air during his Upstate visit.
Then came Twitter, and over time, his blog became less and less active. “I haven’t posted anything in over a year,” he says. “I much prefer Twitter to get my ideas out. I initially set out to simply post interesting updates/ advice on infections and outbreaks, but have since got involved in more widespread issues including medical education, the use of IT in healthcare, as well as meeting new people. I had dinner last week with two people I met initially on Twitter—Aaron Stupple and Bob West, along with Kent Bottles, MD.” His epiphany came after his first 1,000 tweets. “I realized that, far from using it as a way to deliver
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