LIKES, DISLIKES AND REPOSTS; THE NEW AGE OF THE VASCULAR SURGERY INFLUENCER

noticed by the state medical boards in the U.S. Recently, a plastic surgeon in Ohio had her license suspended for exploitation of Snapchat and TikTok by airing live videos of her surgeries. This doctor has a popular TikTok account, which, prior to being suspended and then set to private, had 841,600 followers and 14.6 million likes. Her Instagram account, now also set to private, has 123,000 followers. One of her patients was quoted as saying: “I went to her because, I thought, from all of her social media, that she uplifted women. That she helped women empower themselves. But she didn’t.” Plastic surgery has been plagued by a social media presence that often flirts with unethical standards. This space suffers from a lack of regulation, surveillance, consistent rating scales, user authentication and ethical accountability. People are building entire reputations based on Altmetric Attention Score (#altmetrics), which has, to a great degree, replaced the more traditional academic bibliometrics like h-index. The Altmetric Attention Score is a weighted count of all the online attention for an individual research output. This includes mentions in essentially every public forum, and social network platforms play a particularly important role. With the advent of endovascular techniques, vascular surgery is very analogous to plastics in that the graphics of the procedures make them very “post-” and “like-” worthy.

In 2015, Prestin et al estimated that 70% of adults got their medical information from the internet. Social media, therefore, is an extremely powerful tool. How we engage in that space plays a significant role in defining vascular surgery as a profession and speaks volumes about our character as individuals. Our posting habits and decisions have the power to sway consumers as well as dictate the reputation of our specialty.

JEAN BISMUTH is a vascular surgeon at Katy Heart and Vascular Institute in Houston and an associate professor of surgery at Louisiana State University.

JONATHAN CARDELLA is is an associate professor of surgery at Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut, and program director of Yale’s integrated vascular surgery residency.