The intriguing new science of social networking is demonstrating how personal interconnections can affect our health. Social networking sites focus in helping people being introduced to other people dealing with similar issues and provide information, contacts, peer support, and encouragement. The people you live with, work with, talk to, email, and chat to on social networking sites can sometimes be good or bad for your health. Does this mean that social networking sites are enticing people to spend more time online and less time interacting with others face-to-face?
People want comfort, and talking to others suffering from the same symptoms gives them piece of mind, knowing that they are not alone. Learning what has worked for others, what hasn’t worked for others, is their disease progressing fast or slow, what they have been told to do next and how they are coping, are all strategies to help them through their illness and disease. This information is difficult to find and certainly difficult for many medical practitioners to provide, that personal touch and understanding is often missing, people don’t really have a local health community doctor anymore, so where do they turn?
Ideas and habits that influence health for better or for worse can spread through social networks in much the same way that germs spread through communities. In social networks, though, transmission can happen even though the people may be located in various countries from one another.
Within social networking communities, happiness spreads more readily between members of the same sex than between people of the opposite sex. It also seemed to reach across at least three degrees of separation, spreading, for example, from a friend to the friend of a friend and then to the friend of that friend. But the impact diminished with each degree of separation. How does this effect weight? Members of a community want comfort, and talking to others suffering from the same symptoms gives them piece of mind, knowing that they are not alone. This alone provides a level of security and some happiness .
The more we know about how healthy habits , positive attitudes, and wise lifestyle choices spread through communities, the more it will help health experts to use natural social networks to improve public health.
Michael Dornan is a passionate IT executive, who suffers from a condition, saw there was more that could be done to connect patients, created Social-medicine.org that intends to globally connect and help people.
Social-medicine.org, a health based social networking site, helps people suffering from a variety of health conditions, to globally connect, help and share information with others in similar situations, by focusing on bridging the gap of patient-to-patient communication, and patient-to-practitioner communication, with all the social networking features and functionality expected in today’s society.
Social Medicine fosters community support, where real people in similar situations come together, to circumvent negative feelings like disconnection and loneliness, and focus on improving self-esteem, understanding, communication, relationships, and peer support.