If you’ve read these posts over any period of time you’ll know my views on the excessive use of social media and Facebook dentistry are relatively clear cut and well established.
Your right to use social media for whatever purpose you want (as long as it’s legal) at the moment is well accepted but as a profession it might be time for us to consider a bit of ‘self-regulation’.
You know that thing where the Government says to some sort of industry “if you don’t produce some sort of guidelines, we’ll produce them for you”?
I reckon it’s time for us to do that.
I was pointed towards Facebook by a friend of mine who wanted me to look at a particular thread based around dishonesty so I had a look, but of course, was sucked straight back into the black hole.
One of the biggest problems I see (having been out of the way for a while and not looking inwards) is the terrible intertwined confusion of people’s personal and professional lives.
I’m thinking it’s probably time for the profession to have some sort of voluntary code on separating professional and personal lives from Facebook and other social media channels because if patients seek us out in a professional way then they might be looking at pictures of us on the beach with a g-string on, snorting coke!!
It’s unlikely that you post a picture like that on the front page of your website so why would you post it on a mixed social media feed of dentistry and personal?
#lovemylife has no place in professional postings about the work that you do for patients, particularly because it has the potential to denigrate the reputation of all the professionals within your field, but even more importantly, because there is a significant risk that it will encourage people into dentistry, who are at a very easily influenced age under false premise on an understanding of a promise of a superstar lifestyle.
Bringing the profession into ‘disrepute’ or professional misconduct comes in many different forms and surely this might be considered to be one of them and one that we could easily fix with a few words of our own.
Blog Post Number: 1867