Surgery Goes Web 2.0
One of these things is not like the other: "Watching a good bootleg of The Wrestler." "Holy cannoli, unhappy baby. Early bedtime for you, kiddo." "Dr rogers (sic) has adequately sutured closed the urinary collecting system and any bleeding vessels."
The first two come directly from the people I'm following on Twitter. The last one is also from Twitter, the microblogging/short messaging service. While the first two are entertaining, or at least mildly informative, the last one is obviously a bit more serious.
On the morning of Feb. 9 at Henry Ford Hospital, the chief resident sat by on a computer tweeting about the live tumor removal being performed by lead surgeon Dr. Craig Rogers at the same time, in the same room. The resident managed to capture the surgery blow-by-blow in 140-character "tweets" as it happened. Here's the stream of the surgery on Twitter.
According to CNN, "Dr. Craig Rogers, the lead surgeon in the Henry Ford surgery, said the impetus for his Twittering was to let people know that a tumor can be removed without taking the entire kidney. ‘We're trying to use this as a way to get the word out,' Rogers said."
With social networking sites abounding, there's likely to be more of this happening. Are there limits to what should be shared on the Internet? Just this morning, I was contemplating updating my Facebook friends on the status of a broken sewer pipe in my apartment. No, that's not pretty information at all, and yes, I just told the Internet via this blog. Is "tweeting" the surgery as it happens progress, or just pushing the limits of privacy?
I personally think the idea is pretty cool, as long as the patient consents to being tweeted about. If the information is helpful to others performing or curious about the surgery, then it might be worth it for more than just a novel Internet trick.
I look at it from two angles. If I was getting ready to go through a robotic partial nephrectomy, as the patient did in the Tweetstream above, I would probably be scouring the Web for information beforehand, and coming across the tweets would either calm my fears or seriously wig me out. And if I was getting ready to go under the knife and was asked if I would mind being tweeted about during surgery, well, I might hesitate a bit on that one. What are your thoughts?