Web 2.0 technologies (e.g., blogs, social networks, and wikis) are increasingly being used by medical schools and postgraduate training programs as tools for information dissemination. These technologies offer the unique opportunity to track metrics of user engagement and interaction.
The use of social networks and the Internet by the patients as tools to search medical information is nowadays an everyday phenomenon. If neurosurgeons want to join to this conversation, providing quality content, we must adapt to this new scenario and incorporate new ways to communicate with patients and other medical professionals.
Several neurosurgeons have already broken this digital gap and have started to provide relevant content through their blogs, whose content is spread through social networks. But the utilization of these new technologies is not without risks from an ethical and a deontological viewpoint, and it can risk our digital reputation. The Internet also involves saturation by too much information, and the correct use of certain web-based tools can help to avoid this “intoxication” improving our productivity.
As an open access resource, the role of the Internet has been increasing in our professional life. There are several emergent new tools that can facilitate and make it more efficient to get accurate and reliable information. In an article, Barbosa Pereira et al. discussed how we can manage to get the most from these new instruments, like blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, in order to improve clinical practice. With good sense and some caution, these can turn to be of valuable help in our careers 1).