Recollections of a Social Media Newbie

You must admit that you happen to ecounter at least one social media site in your entire blogging career. While you joined to leave links in your accounts that were redirected to your blogs, you also reserved a tag for “social media” among your posts. You certainly knew the link building potency of such sites that you often would not miss strategies on improving and sustaining traffic from it, however dried and stale those strategies were constructed.

I have to admit that my exposure to social media is very minimal. I submitted my site to only a few. In fact, Hulag was missed in Eugene's initial Top Philippine Blogs According to Alexa despite having a rank of 74,481 which would make it number 20 in the list a probable reason that it is not registered in Ratified.org which is a near complete aggregation of active Filipino blogs. I know it was my fault Eugene, thank you very much for including me in the list. But certainly, though I had been working across my hectic offline schedule to network harder to gain traffic and link backs, this is not my point of rendering you a social media related topic.

Social Media is an umbrella term that defines the various activities that integrate technology, social interaction, and the construction of words and pictures. That is the exact wikipedia definition. Wikipedia itself is a social media of reference type. So the word social media is beyond just the popular bookmarks we click and networking communities we joined. It even encompases social advertising such as Entrecard, event promotion such as Upcoming and online gaming such as World of Warcraft. To a certain context, blogs and podcasts are also forms of social media, so are your e-mails and instant messagings.

Accompanying exposure, a social medium with a substance is a farm of fresh feeds to the brain. Through which, you can either read good posts common or uncommun to you. In turn you will be assisted in blogging as your readings helps you see things better, your aawareness invites cooking of new ideas. Through a social medium you can discuss opinions especially with experienced bloggers around might provide you insights. Such interaction solicits tastes from multiple palates improving your mastery of your knowledge recepie. I would like to harvest new ideas first from my ten trusted (though I have not joined some yet) social sites:

The Four Forwarding Blogging Bookmarks

• Del.iciou.us
• Digg
• Reddit
• Stumble Upon

The Three Threading Comprehensive Communities

• Blog Catalog
• Bumpzee
• MyBlogLog

The Two Trendy Sharing Sites

• Flickr
• You Tube

The One Online Link Authority

• Technorati
  

To utilize social media is not to scavenge data or files from accounts of other. But to consume the collective intelligence funneled from them as daily living knowledge diet. Meanwhile, as you munch forward, you will be lumped with false statements, abusive expressions of freedom, blogging indifference, piggybacking, borrowed forms of trust, experiments with controversies or dry topics. But once swallowed you will just get used to them. If digested, they becoming additional learning nutrients to your self improvement. Rather participate it social media as they facilitate free-for-all knowlege farming sprees.

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Ravening Rococo Researches

I attended a drug company sponsored product safety review for NSAIDS and coxibs. These Nonsteroidal Anti-inflammatory Drugs (NSAIDS) are the tabs and caps we now and then buy over-the-counter for the quite relative symptom of pain we are experiencing. How many do not use Diclofenac, Ibuprofen, Mefenamic Acids, Meloxicam, Naproxen or Nimesulide which are a few generic of these? I'm sure only a few will assert as the rest are more familiar with their abused brand names which I will not promote here out of medical ethics. Coxibs are the rather new relatively safer yet expensive family of pain remedies. Unfamiliar still? Check your medicine cabinet for the generics. Almost constantly one of them is there.

The session, which is just one of the many dinner-preceded, drug product presentations held many times a week in my small city, is a talk less on the mechanism of formation of adverse effects of the drugs itself and more on understanding the reliability and relativity of researches done to satisfy such knowledge. The speaker started questioning everyone in the medical society how often they have been fooled by other speakers in other drug product presentations whom they rather take as surrogate markers for medical truth. He then equates the number to that of laymen who take drug commercial endorsers as surrogate markers for their idea of relief. Though only members of the medical society are present, there is no need to compute for comparison as everyone but a few, out of human vulnerability, have once or twice been fooled. Our speaker explained that we have propensity to be enthralled by the maturity, status, and enlightening background of other speakers who were suppose not to present clinical experiences but rather scientific data of which anyone who can understood can explain. Also, we almost always revere research outcome without assessing the potential inaccuracies in their methodologies especially the inclusion and exclusion of data. Several studies on side effects of pain relievers were then one by one dissected by him speaking only less ill to the generic of the brand of the sponsoring drug company. Somehow familiar then followed endorsement of their brand's generic as the best. However, certain things such as reviews on everyone's ramblings over theories on relativity which strikingly makes even the Einstein's Theory remain Relative already stuck with me.

The myth of science is its totally being true. Yes, it follows logic but not everything logical presents truth. One reason is that the nomenclature used in descriptive research once utilized for experiment can still be influenced by human biases. Take for example the symptom of pain. Evaluation of its intensity is subjected to individual conceptualization of degrees of pain. Given a range of 0 to 10 with 10 as the most painful experience one ever had in his entire life. One's idea of 5/10 may be 8/10 to you or just 3/10 to mine. Moreover, once you ask a person to characterize pain, how close is his idea of burning, cutting, pricking, tingling, stabbing, cramping, aching, throbbing, crushing, shooting, lancinating or jabbing to yours. For example, if you will use these semi-standardized data for an outstanding study, you might be adored in the scientific world but your results will remain relative to the angle of truth.

Take care in devouring every ounce of information you see, hear, or read even from elaborate advance scientific researches. Currently, my group of four is trying to finish a research which is a requirement for completing our one year post graduate medical internship course. I left the review of similar studies to the finest of my scrutinizing command; however systematic they boastfully describe their techniques, to minimize the chance of having also a waste basket worth of study.

How much of science is reliable to you?

Soliciting Another Opinion

It is easier to teach than to be taught. The persistent student is upset with the feeling of being a beggar for knowledge. But for a hospital person like me, it is very healthy to give up and refer once you can not rule out a possibility of a diagnosis to a patient beyond your known field. Medicine for once is subdivided into specialties: Internal Medicine (Adult), Pediatrics, Surgery, Obstetrics and Gynecology, Psychiatry, Anesthesia, Orthopedics, Rehabilitative Medicine, Radiology, Pathology, Ophthalmology, Otolaryngology are the few basics. Furthermore, there are subspecialties in every field. In the Philippines, a specialty requires 3-5 years of training after you have passed the medical board exam. Another 2-3 years training is required for a subspecialty. The long years of training of other physicians, gives you less shame in asking for their specialty and subspecialty opinion once your patient is presenting signs and symptoms beyond your experience.

Applying this idea to fields outside medicine makes us realize that if we know less of a thing; it is fine to solicit another opinion about it. An expert opinion at best, but just another opinion able sapien may do at times your once a particular idea is midnightly presenting to you. Take asking opinion a habit as world knowledge is not just yours. There is security in living knowing there are learned people who can help you along the way. But halt! Do not track back my opinion in your aims of promoting knowledge dependency. Remember to squeeze your brain cells before tickling that of others. I am now soliciting your opinion on this post.

How...

There are no perfect steps, there are just excellent ways.

Drop by a critic below and declare “I don't agree with Wangbu.” After doing so, do not be wordless if you are still plead to comment again as I pocket sincere censure more than flattering lies. That would make this blog at high risk of obtaining injurious disapprovals, yet I’ll consent it to be. I am prepared to abort praises for a worthwhile bonding with a new knowledge, for which, I am tickling any reader to “Please supply earful advices for this blog on how to craft it to assist one and all procrastinators.” I endorse frank input.

I attended a supplementary seminar in Pulmonary Medicine few days back where lectures delivered excellently by a team of dexterous medical educators. “Dexterous” is less that a satisfactory adjective to point up how they suctioned common practices involving respiratory medicine which become boring hospital fundamentals yet they breath an moving copy to it. This case could be likened to how to get an x-ray view from a human being passing by in front of you. Though in medical world such view is impossible, that somehow describes the impact of the whole seminar to me. I am, however, not discouraged tracking how distant my week-long post-graduate clinical experience from those of the lecturers. In fact I find it an inspirational challenge to cope and beat. Sounds ambitious, but true.

In medicine, which is often regarded as an art branching out of human life science, a clinician can be an artist in five ways:

1. A Conceiving Artist. A research medical practitioner might think of, lay and breed fresh solutions to combat diseases and to decrease mortality. He might of course come out to be heroic since by being a conceiving artist is far from painless task despite the evolution of technology. Since they deal with unraveling on diseases that has been thought “for sure no cure,” some clinicians, public or self-confessed, uses this as confident step to grab a prize, local or Nobel, and print their names in encyclopedic pages.
2. An Adapting Artist. A clinic medical artist modifies established health care protocols to suit patient per patient cases. He has freedom to adapt redesign or more effectively update health promotion, diagnostic tools and therapeutic guidelines and make it fit date-place patients (ex. 2007-Philippines). The fun and gratification comes from patient’s improvement from certain ways you been able to touch them with your art.
3. An Training Artist. A theoretical and clinical instructor, medicine wise is a honorary job as physicians are more used to giving medical prescription than taking it. This group of people established the borders of medical practice first to the upcoming physicians, specialist or sub specialist and encouraging them to outsource opinions especially from the well established schools of thought.
4. A Community Artist. An altruistic caretaker of pulic health. The kind of med artist I would not chose to be not because I am far from being an altruist but because public health is generally a political entity.
5. A Mobilizing Artist. A medical practicioner reaching beyond medicine in influencing and inspiring people. Not specially sutable for a beginner like me.
   

Expect this paragraph to be slightly twisted from the ones above as my main point in this post is to ascertain the beginner in me. I am a beginner in medicine and in self-motivation and in the world of writing in a blog. As beginner, I do not really need to be a conceiving artist always. Nor I am expected to be adept enough to train others. Though I am trying to be a conceiver and a trainer for procrastinators in this blogs, I prefer still to outsource opinions from others. Though not fungally always. I found out that in what ever move we do there is always no single perfect step known but reading and applying from more resources shows one excellent ways to face life in general. Even new researchers require review of related literature to support it.

This post is sixth of a 7-part ellipsis series.