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CHICAGO -- Whether they like it or not, each physician has his or her own presence on social media, so they'd better start figuring out how to manage it, , said Saturday at the American Medical Association's (AMA) annual meeting here.
The biggest reason that patients go onto social media is to get information about a disease they have and potential treatments for it, Pho, an internist in Nashua, N.H. who runs ľֱ's KevinMD blog, told the AMA's medical student section. However, he added, patients also go online to look for information on their physician.
Pho gave two examples of physicians who found out their online reputations were not quite what they hoped for. One was , an internist here. Upon Googling herself, Arora discovered that there was another physician with the same name -- a male . The trouble was, that Vineet Arora had been accused by a patient of causing blindness in a patient's eye. Arora solved her problem by increasing her social media presence so that her own, more positive, results came up first on Google.
Another physician discovered that a disgruntled patient had set up a fake website in the physician's name in order to disparage the doctor online. The physician -- who became aware of the problem when a patient told the physician that something was wrong with his website -- alerted authorities and the culprit was eventually identified; it turned out that the patient was upset because the physician had prescribed an incorrect medication.
These examples show why physicians need to "get out in front" of their profiles on social media, Pho continued. One way to prevent problems like this is to "Google yourself once a week," so you can see what is being said about you online. Doctors also should set up an online profile -- through sites such as and -- so patients will see that first when they Google the doctor.
After doctors establish a basic online presence, they can go on to use other forms of social media such as Twitter or blogging if they'd like, but the important thing is to at least get started and pay attention to how you are being portrayed online, he added.