Private investigators may find that many doctors post on Facebook or Tweeter.

"No matter how you parse it, doctors don't avoid the Internet and social media because they're simply Luddites," Westby Fisher, an Evanston, Ill., cardiac electrophysiologist, wrote last month on his blog, Dr. Wes. "They avoid the Internet because they enjoy the benefits of anonymity, privacy, efficiency and legal protection that come with dropping off the grid."

As Nashua, N.H., internist Kevin Pho wrote in a USA TODAY op-ed piece in January, "there is little guidance on how physicians can incorporate (social media) into their medical practice."

Acknowledging that problem, the American Medical Association's Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs last month passed a resolution to "study the issue of physicians' use of social networking, as exemplified on sites such as Facebook and Twitter" and report to the AMA's House of Delegates at its meeting in November.

Another roadblock, Pho said, is that doctors usually get paid only for talking to patients in the examining room, giving physicians little financial incentive to reach out to them over the Web.

But, continued Pho, whose Twitter and Linked-In profiles refer to him as social media's leading physician voice, "doctors who are not active online risk being marginalized."

Link:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2010-07-08-SOCIALDOCS08_ST_N.htm