Capsule Minds: The Battle Over TikTok in Healthcare
Bryan Vartabedian, MD
TikTok health champions and skeptics are haggling on MedTwitter over TikTok’s worthiness as a platform. It started with some bad physician actors posting stuff that was disrespectful to patients. The disagreement looks something like this:
TikTok health skeptic: “This is a place where bad things happen.”
TikTok health champion: “Pinheads are not platform-specific.”
The champs are right. This stuff happens everywhere. And no social platform is pinhead agnostic.
But this really isn’t what the haggling’s about. The root of it is probably closer to this:
TikTok health skeptic: “I’m unfamiliar and uncomfortable with TikTok so I’m going to take potshots at it.”
TikTok health champion: “As an early adopter, dammit, I’m going to work to sell the world on TikTok as the next great thing.
Clearly, there’s an opportunity here for both TikTok health champions and skeptics to find common ground.
What the TikTok Health Skeptics Can Do
Respect the diversity of the whole social media landscape. Recognize that there are a lot of different media and tools for sharing. TikTok, like every other tool, has the ability to reach a particular audience. And that’s good for the doctors with targeted needs.
Be comfortable in your space. It’s okay to see the success of something that doesn’t fit the way you communicate. Everyone has a different communication wardrobe.
Give it a shot. Poke the box a bit and try it out. I’m lurking at the moment and I likely will sit this one out. But I do understand the importance of flirting with things.
What the TikTok Health Champions Can Do
Respect the diversity of the whole social landscape. Not everyone is okay with animated video clips of themselves.
Be comfortable in your space. Arguments, zingers, and last words on Twitter likely won’t determine whether TikTok sees broader adoption in the medical community. The crowd/market decides.
Bring value. It’s too early to say where TikTok will land on the value equation. The big pitch has been that TikTok works well as a health education tool with teens. But despite what we want to believe about doctors and social media, the cold, inconvenient truth is that only a minority of doctors use social media (primarily) to educate their patients and many of them don’t treat the teen audience. So if TikTok proves to have staying power in medicine it will probably have to exist beyond the education of the teen set.
TikTok Health Forces Physicians to Think About What They’re Trying to Do
I will add that if other social media platforms can serve as an indicator, how TikTok is used today will have no relation to how it is used three years from now.
But either way, this conversation is good. Pro/con thinking like this can be applied to any new social tool.
New platforms create the opportunity to rethink why we’re here and what we’re trying to do as public physicians. It’s through answering these questions that TikTok might take shape as a healthcare tool. Personally, looking at what docs are now doing with this helps me understand why I fit in where I do. And that’s a useful (and hopefully inspiring) exercise for every health professional.
Bryan Vartabedian is a physician and writer whose work covers the intersection of medicine, technology, and culture. The founder of 33 charts, a site which has been archived in its entirety in the National Library of Medicine, he currently works as the Director of Community Medicine for the Division of Gastroenterology, Hepatology & Nutrition for Texas Children’s Hospital and is a full-time faculty member at Baylor College of Medicine, where he developed the country’s first longitudinal curriculum for digital communication in undergraduate medical education. He is a core advisor for Stanford Medicine X and a founding advisor for the Healthcare Track of SXSW Interactive, and was previously an External Advisory Board of the Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media. Follow him on Twitter here.
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