Surgeons Tweet Procedures From Operating Room

In recent times, we've heard how doctors in remote areas of the world make successful surgeries and diagnoses with the help of the Internet, and we've also seen “hacks” of certain mobile phones to detect disease in blood samples. It looks like the medical world will continue going through some big changes down the line. Just last week, a surgery to remove a cancerous tumor from a man's kidney was actually tweeted from the operating room into the Internet.

As we all know, Twitter is the hugely-popular micro-blogging social media platform that lets people tell the world what they're doing right now. Last February 9, doctors from the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit attempted to show that it was possible to remove a tumor from a man's kidney without having to take out the kidney itself – and succeeded, under the watchful eyes of Twitterville.

The way I see it, tweeting surgical procedures is pretty much like videotaping a surgery and using the footage in lectures for medical students. But tweeting a surgery has the advantage of giving a real-time broadcast of the procedures, which can help students more than watching hazy videos of a surgery done using last year's technology.

The procedure received a lot of interest from people around the world, but was met with some stinging (although mostly ignorant) criticism. Much of the bad rap came from those who argued that the patient's privacy was being violated. Of course, I'm pretty sure the patient signed a release form for the surgery to be tweeted, just as patients sign release forms for their surgeries to be videotaped.

(Also, it boggled me to no end how some people reading the CNN article thought the surgeon was stupid for tweeting while doing the procedure, when the article clearly said the tweeting was done by another doctor while the surgeon was operating. I think prior to tweeting or commenting on stories like these, people ought to learn how to read first...)

In any case, I think this is another step in the right direction for social media, as it's making medical access and health care more available and transparent than ever before. Now people have the opportunity to see what goes on behind closed doors in a hospital, reducing any apprehension these people might have from the medical world.

I'm pretty sure this won't be the last innovation the medical world will make out of social media. Who knows? Maybe someday we'll see the first ever Tweetstream in a delivery room. Your baby would be a celebrity before he/she can walk.