Future doctors share too much on Facebook, UF researchers say
Future doctors share too much on Facebook, UF researchers say
Would it bother you to know that your physician smokes cigars and likes to do “keg stands”? That your gynecologist was a member of a group called “I Hate Medical School”? That your urologist is a fan of “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre”?
That is exactly the sort of information many people share on social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace. According to a new University of Florida study, many medical students are sharing far too much.
“College has traditionally been a time in life when non-normative behaviors are considered OK,” said Dr. Lindsay Acheson Thompson, an assistant professor of general pediatrics at UF’s College of Medicine. “I’m not sure I would want to have a permanent, public record of everything I did 10 years ago, but many of our students are creating just such a record, and they need to understand the problems this may cause.”
Thompson and several researchers from the UF’s colleges of Education and Medicine did a review of the Facebook sites of 362 UF medical students and residents and found that a significant portion of them were publicizing personal information most physicians would never share with their patients.
The study was published this week in the Journal of General Internal Medicine.
The researchers looked up more than 800 medical students by name on Facebook, finding that 44 percent of them (for a total of 362) had profiles on the social networking service. Only 37 percent of those students had made their Facebook entries private — the most obvious safeguard against revealing too much personal information on the Web.
Source: University of Florida News