Blogging is fun, isn't it? People blog for different purposes; some like to vent out every single frustrating thing they've faced in their lives, some people like to create an online travel log, some people like to create an online food haven, some were prescribed blogging as a way to cope with depression or any other psychiatric illnesses and some were blogging to educate the masses on various subjects. Whether the information contained in a blog is relevant or not, it doesn't matter for most people and that's why there were too many false information, plagiarism, online frauds and even cult made its way into the blogging platform. Once, when Blogger is a popular blogging platform on the internet, it's pretty easy to monitor fellow blogger's activity feed which makes any information including gossips to spread out quickly like a wildfire. Despite that, I saw it as a potential space for fellow scientists and medical practitioners to create a pool of medical information and scientific research to be read and share with the public.
As a blogger, you can write about anything that has gotten your interest. You wouldn't need to be an MD to write about medical stuff, an engineer to write any topic related to engineering or even a traveller to blog about any specific place on the earth you were most fascinated by. It's one of the reasons which questioned the validity of information extracted from various blogging site compared to when you read articles published in journal sites (although it can be expensive for people to access certain papers). As a medical doctor, I'm interested in preventative medicine and the importance of medical education among people in the public; be it people with medical knowledge or laymen. Prevention is important but sometimes, as a clinician, I need to accept the fact that there were various factors that can contribute to the pathophysiology of diseases. Cancer, for example, can be caused by various carcinogenic materials, radiation etc. but some people were more genetically predisposed than the other making it irrelevant to blame the affected individual (some people get lung cancer from them being a second-hand smoker).
When we were trying to convey the importance of prevention and why is it necessary to consult physicians instead of spending your money on various traditional treatment modalities, blogging might be one of the most effective ways. However, nowadays, people rely heavily on various micro-blogging site called the social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) to socialise with one another making the conventional blogging obsolete. It's much more effective, convenient and less time-consuming; in blogging, sometimes people spend more than 8 hours, sitting in front of their computers, do a lot of research and finally publish an article for the whole world to read, but for a social media, you will only need at most, 30 minutes, to produce a scientific statement which might get updated later, forming a series of mini-articles, later, a single complete article. It's difficult to convince people nowadays to start blogging about stuff; social media has become an important component in an individual life. Tell me, what did you do first thing in the morning after you woke up after checking the time on your phone?
There were a few studies which have been conducted in the past to investigate the impact of blogging on the scientific community. Although almost 90% of 865 subjects (scientists who were born after 1980) which were interviewed agree that blogging can encourage people to pursue science which would impact the community as a whole (by recruiting bright mind), only 15% of them have blogs with little to no update at all. It's a bit contradictory to the benefit that a scientific blog can give to the community and since scientific bloggers rarely succeed in terms of making a constant update to their blogs, we can't really confirm whether it is actually the right tool to recruit most of the talented and bright minds to consider pursuing their careers in science. Most of the reasons why they weren't able to pursue blogging rooted from the fact they didn't have much time to commit such acts. As a medical doctor, I understand their predicament; I'm myself, have to work between 14-48 hours (depending if I'm on-call or not) and most of the time, when we do have some free times, we will be spending it with our families, friends or stay at home, sleeping, trying to replace lost sleeping hours.
Like any other efforts in communicating update regarding science and field related to it such as conferences and lectures, blogging has been though as a digital effort at communicating advancement in sciences. People interact with each other regarding certain topics, learn especially for laymen who are not familiar with the topics and maybe try to search or discuss an idea before putting it into a dissertation or something. It's a potential space for everyone to discuss and make use of available resources towards achieving a mutual understanding or initiating an online academic debate for the benefit of science; I will consider any scientist who reluctant to take blogging as an opportunity to improve themselves while simplifying the effort of communicating science as a waste of an opportunity. The same study which has been conducted on 865 scientists has found that 70% of them agree that using blogs as a medium for scientific communication can improve fellow scientists knowledge and career's prospect. It's quite elegant and definitely a sophisticated solution, won't you think?
Why A Medical-Based Student Should Blog?
Actually, I would like to extend this part of the discussion to all people from the medical-based communities but since among us, students are more likely to take up blogging as an activity during their leisure time (they have so much free time anyway), so yeah. It doesn't matter who you are; a medical student, a nursing student, a medical assistant student or any students who were from a medical and health-based field should understand that educating the masses are important to establish a healthy and productive community. I've been babbling on numerous occasions about the importance of achieving longevity in order to contribute more to the mankind, but it is also important for us to understand living a long life with chronic diseases is not what I have envisioned. To contribute better to the community, people need to be healthy and to do that, any necessary steps at prevention should have been started since they were young. Let's take medical students as an example as that's what I'm most familiar with (I think the concept should be the same for all of the medical-based students).
There were quite a number of blogs written by medical students but most of them focus on emotional instability and sometimes irrelevant content related to what they were doing throughout a specific clinical posting. Let me be clear, it's not a crime to update your blog at your own discretion but what I seek here is the opportunities to use the blog as a tool in discussing and sharing medical knowledge with the other medical students across the globe. In some universities, students are expected to produce reflective writings as a part of their academic requirement to complete their studies; and I know this because I'm used to becoming frustrated with the fact that I have to reflect something (in 500 words) on a paper, for every semester I have been through. One of the most important parts of becoming a good medical doctor is an experience. People experience every single day differently, some people went through hell with their clinical rotation, some were blessed with good supervisors and some were ignored (that's a routine thing of being a medical student).
Why is it beneficial for a medical student to share their own experience with the others? One word, motivation. There is a huge step when transitioning from the pre-medical studies to clinical studies. During the pre-medical studies, we have to listen to lots of lectures, strengthening our medical-based theories and sit for exams in order to progress but when it comes to clinical rotation of a medical study, we have to communicate with patients, deal with rejections, learn how to present cases to your respective supervisors (which are usually medical consultants) and pursuing lots of related procedures. Speaking from my experiences being a medical student, there were3 of my friends who quit the program because they can't cope with the system. Well, the system was not at fault and my friends were not to be blamed; they just need a little encouragement and motivation, believing that every single thing they were going through were normal. It's certainly not easy to obtain a piece of medical degree but so do any science-related field. They need to be told by someone who has experienced this the reason why medicine is worth studying. Blogs can be a great tool for establishing a digital support system between people in scientific communities.
Even though it is good to share a great deal of medical information in your blog, that doesn't give you the right to plagiarise or even to make the structure looks like a common medical-based website such as Healthline or WebMD. It will depend solely on how creative you are at attracting people with your title and introduction to the topic you want to educate the public with. According to the Proceedings of International Conference on European Transnational Education (ICEUTE), sharing articles is the key feature of a blog and when it is integrated to a social media system (like Steemit), it will bring its efficiency to the whole new level. It will be easier for people to communicate with each other while searching for any topic of interest of a specific individual. People can create a community, utilising specific tools which can only be attained in social media to their blog and of course, providing a nurturing environment for scientific discussion and critics.
In medical studies, there were three tools which kinda work for me and quite cheap (mostly free) compared to others, which are:
- Blogs
- Audio recordings of medical lectures
- Online videos/tutorials which can be obtained online (Youtube)
Let me clarify that all of these tools would be insufficient if it is not being used in conjunction with the other academic materials such as textbooks or medical lecture notes. It acts as a supplement to assist the incorporation of medical knowledge and contribute to a better understanding towards a specific subject. However, it should be noted that compared to the conventional teaching materials such as books, lecture notes and all, a blog is more portable, can be accessed by any students around the world and easily portable. Even though some studies indicate that the uses of all of the item mentioned above can improve memory retention in medical students, conventional teaching materials were still widely used. A study conducted by Back in 2017 has found that free open access medical learning materials (podcast) would provide a greater memory gained and retention by significant figures compared to textbook provided among test subject.
Even though the study only focuses on podcasts, it is relatively known that a blog post can be comprised of anything; it can be videos, audios or a standard text article. A study conducted by Kelly et al in January 2018 has found that blog post can be a useful tool in learning a new topic of study. 65 students who were involved in the study shows a significant knowledge gain and retention in Toxicology (a subject that was not covered in medical school) compared to a topic related to asthma (which is covered in medical school) even though, knowledge-wise, it is still considered better than the result obtained by reading textbooks. It is good to learn something new but in science, there will never be enough knowledge that could satisfy fellow scientists so a regular update among the scientific community is a crucial part which could be achieved through blogging. A medical student will still need support from the community to progress further and it is good to record every single thing that you (as a medical student) have learned today to reflect what you have achieved today and you could achieve tomorrow.
In a study conducted by Hadas Shema et al in 2012, she has listed 11 main categories among 126 science blogs which were commonly used as tags:
- Life sciences
- Medicine
- Sciences
- Psychology
- Psychiatry
- Neurosciences
- Behavioural sciences
- Multidisciplinary
- Social sciences
- Computer science
- Engineering
Obviously, it didn't carry any weight in this discussion as things might have changed (well it is 6 years) but it does illustrate what kind of topic were popular back then. Medical-related topics have been popular since then so it would be good if every people can contribute to the advancement of science through blogging.
Sources
- Why science blogging still matters
- 9 Reasons Why Running A Science Blog Is Good For You
- 5 Reasons Med Students Should Blog
- Blogging Medical Students: A Qualitative Analysis
- A Randomized Comparative Trial of the Knowledge Retention and Usage Conditions in Undergraduate Medical Students Using Podcasts and Blog Posts
- Superior Gain in Knowledge by Podcasts Versus Text-Based Learning in Teaching Orthopedics: A Randomized Controlled Trial.
- Research Blogs and the Discussion of Scholarly Information
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