In a survey of 405 postgraduate trainee doctors (residents and fellows) from France, researchers examined how doctors are using Facebook — not only for themselves, but also in their interactions with patients.
Facebook, if you’ve been sleeping for the past year and didn’t notice TIME magazine just named Mark Zuckerberg — Facebook’s CEO and founder — Person of the Year, is the world’s largest social networking site. It allows you to connect with other acquaintances (they use the term “friends,” but this is a ridiculous use of the word since most people’s Facebook connections are not traditional friends) easily, online.
Perhaps too easily. The relationship between doctor and patient (or therapist and client) isn’t one based upon friendship. It’s a professional relationship with boundaries. Apparently, though, some doctors aren’t aware of those boundaries — at least according to this survey.
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My old social worker is on my fb friends list. but he wasn’t while he was still seeing me every other day. it’s my way of still having a relationship with him though we dont talk very often.
It’s only a great tool if you don’t have any problem with having your parents, coworkers and college buddies in direct contact with one another.
People have multiple identities, any tool that calls itself social and doesn’t separate between said identities is going to either require major changes in people’s social standards, or only allow for the least intimate kinds of communication. Either way, it’s probably a loss.
I decided to take my fb page down after being discovered by several old patients with whom it would have been inappropriate to be an fb friend, however tempting – they are all very nice people. As there might be a resumption of the therapeutic relationship this meant I couldn’t just block them (rejection) but had to write a personal explanation of the ethics… this got quite tiresome and must still have felt rejecting I suspect.
It is totally unhealthy to have a patient, a doctor, a nurse, a boss, a subordinate to be checking out all those private stuff you are sharing online. This is a great post!
Facebook changed the world that is most especially helpful to bond parent and children, between long lost friends and far away love ones. But I personally think, accepting patients as “friends” is unnecessary, that’s drawing the thin line, thinner.
I think these issues are blown way out of proportion the majority of the time.
What would be the problem with a doctor establishing a professional page to provide nothing but information, etc (no treatment) and in doing so, allow patients AND non-patients to “friend” or “like” that page?
I find it hypocritical that some would state “absolutely not” while at the same time, allow everyone and their mother to follow them on Twitter.
In this case, the survey was focusing on patients, but there really is no way for anyone to know whether a “friend” to a physician’s facebook page is a patient or not, rather it is assumed, which is just wrong. I listen to Doctor Radio on Sirius/XM and am a fan of that channel but am not a patient of any of those doctors.
While the issue poses some real ethical and clinical concerns, I believe it does so in very few cases and instead, we tend to make way too much out of these issues. Not every doctor who has a facebook page and has followers (whether friends or fans) is doing something unethical or clinical inappropriate. It is ASSUMED they are, based on how we define facebook “friends”, which as you already pointed out, is a misnomer.
The question then begs, to what degree should physicians, psychologists, etc go to minimize assumptions about “friends” of that professional and even if they should?
i dont know about you guys but i think some details of our lives should be left off the net. even if we want to put it out there, we should ensure that it is private enough. facebook’s privacy settings are constantly changing and its hard to keep up with them. using more privacy aware sites should be the way to go and i hope mycube can make social networking secure again
This article presumes that the people you ‘friend’ on Facebook see themselves as intimate acquaintances… that’s not the case at all. Very few of my Facebook ‘friends’ post anything intimate about their lives at all. It’s mostly a forum for playing games, posting the occasional link, and passing around amusing anecdotes. It’s not possible to get highly personal in 140 characters!
I don’t want to have a Facebook relationship with my doctors or therapist. I believe in boundaries. I only see these people once in a while and I think professionals should stay out of my Facebook life just like I stay out of theirs. Besides, what they do outside the office is none of my business anyway. The doctor or therapist could have a website with all their info about their profession and I could access that if I wanted to.
The challenge is that different people use Facebook differently. Facebook is just a microcosm of the larger Internet — you can pretty much do anything on it now.
So if some people use it to keep in touch only with their intimate acquaintances, while others use it to keep in touch with anyone who “friends” them, then it can lead to some confusion amongst two people who share a professional relationship and have very different expectations of how Facebook is to be used.
I was thinking of looking up my family doctor on Facebook, but after reading this I probably won’t bother and plus he is probably not on FB, cause not everyone is and I am sure if he was he might not accept the request.