An Introductory Post; Why Medical Students (Or Anyone Else) Should Consider Writing A Blog?

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Hi everyone,

I was recently invited to Steemit by one of my friends, @gameoverr. I was shocked at first when he told me the detail about this platform. I have never known some kind of social media and blogger website combination (apart from Steemit) which reward you for a great created content. After 12 hours of extensive tutorial on the basic mechanism of this platform along with some explanation and hands-on tutorial of Markdown Editing, it's time to get serious and immerse myself in the world of blogging. It would be a new experience for me; I have some experience in writing an article but never in blogging. Weird isn't it? Well, if you are a medical student, you would know it is actually not.

As a future health worker, I would like to emphasize more on healthy lifestyle and diseases caused by an unhealthy one. It is saddening to see the majority of patients who came to the clinic for monthly follow up for certain chronic illnesses are preventable. Education is of utmost importance when we are talking about awareness; people wouldn't know something is bad if they didn't have any knowledge regarding specific matters. However, knowing without practising will not bring any benefit either. Smoking, for example, has been a culprit to various kind of cancers. Even though there are a lot of awareness programs being held by the government or non-governmental organisation, the incidence of cancers caused by smoking hasn't been much better. Even though smokers knew puffing a cigarette is not a healthy lifestyle choice, some of them just doesn't really convinced with the facts or they knew about the fact but chose to remain ignorant.

It is important for us, someone who studied and eventually understand the pathophysiology of diseases to step up and try to educate as many people as we can. I think you know by now what kind of blog would I shape mine to be. Here are some reasons why us, someone who is related to the medical field, should blog:

• It is beneficial for the community. People need to know in details regarding anything that concerns them to make an informed decision. However, it should be noted that in some diseases, the outcome and principle of treatment might vary depending on each individual. That's why we need a real doctor apart from an online search engine.

• To fulfil our obligation as an academics. People should know by now the importance of academicians in the community. Each people is a potential specialist in their own respective field. An engineer wouldn't know as much as a doctor would in the context of medicine and vice versa. We need each other to fill in gaps between the known and the unknown. Every people plays an important role in a society.

• To educate ourselves. We have potentially thousands if not millions of people who specialised in a specific field in this platform. That's relatively a rich knowledge pool which should be nurtured to create a productive environment. People should know blogging is not a space for expressing emotion and creating a personal diary only. It is a virtual space where people would be able to exchange and promote their own idea and knowledge with one another while learning something new.

At least, these three reasons are the things that brought me to this platform plus one more; a study published in the open access medical journal (Cureus) in January 2018 has proved that Free Open Access Medical (FOAM) education materials such as podcast and blog post improve medical student's grade significantly. Even though the focus of the study was medical students but I'm sure it will work with the other students as well. To produce a good quality content, we need to some research and read a lot. Indirectly, it cultivates and moulds your personality as an academic which could lead to a better exam's score (if that concerns you).

There are a few advantages of using blog posts compared to the traditional method of teaching:

• Portable¹
• Ease of use¹
• Accessible¹
• Any important points in the blog could be easily incorporated into the student's note¹

There are some factors that should be considered by the content creators to make their blog post much more acceptable by people. Kelly Lien et al have found that a blog post which contains, at most, a thousand words tend to be much more acceptable to readers depending on the type of the blog post; if the topic of the post is novel (relatively new to the reader), then exceeding the words count could be amenable. In the past, making a blog would be difficult if you want it to look presentable to the public. People spend so much money on the template design, web hosting, maybe server (optional) and sometimes a search engine optimisation service. It would generate a huge traffic but that was pretty ka-ching.

A study conducted in 2010 by Edward Alan Miller has identified similar characteristics among the most popular of 951 bloggers related to health genre in the blogosphere. The similarities include:

• Men²
• Young adults²
• Well-educated compared to the general population²

Most of the health blogs written were personally narrated based on medical workers experiences, dealing with a certain aspect of diseases and journalism rather than informational. This can alleviate depressive symptoms, building a virtual support system and increase awareness among the public. Working as medical workers can be quite stressful and it is vital for us to know how to channel that into something beneficial (which can be achieved by blogging). Mental health awareness, stigma and empathy can be nurtured through medical education in virtual spaces provided by the online platform and I'm honestly seeing Steemit as the potential space to do just that.

Pxhere

The validity of the information provided by the internet might be questionable but generally, people considered the internet as a reliable source of information without giving much thought of the author's credibility; one of the many reasons why people who are involved in the medical field should consider blogging. "Doctors might be wrong and internet is a trustworthy sources," say most of the people out there.

Let us build a community which thrives on knowledge. I believe someday, Steemit might be one of the most popular platforms on the internet so making it into an intellectual hub which comprises of knowledge from various fields would be ideal. Thank you for reading my introduction post. I will try to post at least once a day starting tomorrow. Good luck to us all!

References

1. Lien, K., Chin, A., Helman, A., & Chan, T. M. (2018). A Randomized Comparative Trial of the Knowledge Retention and Usage Conditions in Undergraduate Medical Students Using Podcasts and Blog Posts. Cureus, 10(1), e2065.
2. Miller, E. A., & Pole, A. (2010). Diagnosis Blog: Checking Up on Health Blogs in the Blogosphere. American Journal of Public Health, 100(8), 1514–1519.