The Role of Social Media in Health Promotion

Whenever we like or need, we can enjoy an easy access to the internet through our laptops, smart phones or even smart TVs. We connect with our friends and family through facebook or twitter beside the good old emailing system. Text-messaging is a worldwide behavior, you can rarely walk in the street or in the metro without being nearly-hit (or hit) by someone who is busy texting.

This passion about the internet and web-applications can be beneficial to our health as well. Let’s imagine a pop-up email or a message reminder on your phone telling you its exercise-time of the day; you can program it to fit your schedule. You can also link the reminder to a page showing you various exercises.  

What about a facebook or twitter page spreading information about healthy behavior or disease prevention, or a texting system reminding the mothers of the child’s immunization schedule, or how to quickly prepare a healthy food of the day for your family?

Many of what I am mentioning is actually available. The problem though is that they are not on everybody’s top list. Facebook campaigns could help promote cancer screening for example, let’s start a page for people who did colonoscopy to share their stories, or mammography, or PSA. Let us think of the positive impact of hearing from other people who did this test and benefited from it, or let them tell you how hard or easy they though the test was, people can ask others who went through a test about what’s frightening and stopping them, physical or social.

As I mentioned earlier, many of what I am suggesting is available but not as widely known as it should be. But we can change that; let us share with our friends at least a health website, a post or a message whenever possible. Let us start today and at least, at the very least, share one healthy site/ page today .. it’s the bless of the social media that we can share what we think can help us and those we love stay healthy and happy.

One important thing though that’s worth mentioning here: some of the sites or pages spread faulty or inaccurate information, maybe unintentionally. Please check and investigate what you read, it helps you either way. If the message was accurate then you know it and the science of it, otherwise you are not mislead by it and you know why as well. Be inquisitive, it helps to ask and check especially with the abundance of information we are witnessing nowadays, and if needed ask an expert, they will be happy to help.

And if you know a website or a page that you think is very important and useful, you can share it here as well.

Stay healthy, stay well .. and enjoy surfing the net.