Health Improvement With Social Media

In this day and age where every home, school and offices have computers and internet connections, it is not impossible for us to share every thought, emotion and basically everything on social media. Status updates is sometimes the very first thing some teens and young adults do the very first moment they open their eyes in the morning and the last thing they do before dozing off to dreamland.

Since the advent of internet, it has had a huge impact in almost every individual's life and basically provides everything that we need by just one click.  Each citizen in this country owns an account in not just 1 social media but sometimes a person can have 3 or more accounts in different platforms and that is where limitless sharing of almost everything that is going on in our lives happen.

Researchers from Perelman School of Medicine in the University of Pennsylvania in an effort to build a strong database in order to formulate ways to better educate the general public about recent health epidemics and other things that maybe essential to their overall well being looked at social media as a gateway to retrieve such information. Visions of having a health data bank same as what has been done to genetic banking is slowly coming into place with the help of these internet platforms.

We sometimes get to see picture posts of their medication that they are about to take, or have missed taking, laboratory and ultrasound results and other medical stuff being posted. Needless to say, some information gets to be shared in their social media account and more often than not these are the information that they are more likely to omit when talking to their clinician. This then fueled the idea that the data being shared on their personal accounts compared to their actual patient chart can provide valuable information as to the overall health and psychological status of the individual. Researchers also found out that people are more than willing to share information about their health.

In a period of 7 months, participants who gave their consent for researchers to access their social media status and medical records were enrolled in the study which yielded with an approximate of 1.4 million Facebook, Twitter and Instagram posts. What was initially thought as just a leisurely habit of being hooked on social media indeed has its own good side.