Social Networking and Plastic Surgery Education: Running International Plastic Surgery

Dear Editor: Social networking has become an integral part of everyday life with an increasing number of hours spent per day interacting online with both familiar and unfamiliar people. Geographic boundaries have changed and communication costs have decreased drastically. Today, we can interact with others with a simple click, and smartphone technology has made these interactions not only global but also portable and handy, and has enabled us to communicate continuously with our friends, relatives, and colleagues worldwide. Further, mailing lists such as Surginet have been a mean of interactive communication for more than 2 decades now [1,2]. Social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn integrate with professional websites and have made interaction with medical professionals and their staff easier than ever. Plastic surgeons have pioneered social network marketing due to the commercial nature of cosmetic surgery and medicine in practice, and several moderated or non-moderated Facebook groups and pages keep people with similar interests together and interacting. In fact, today, surgeons interact through blogs and Facebook pages, comment on real cases, and create polls and plastic surgery links on these websites to increase their audience, and potentially attract patients. Several aspects of medical education have changed as well [3], and as a founder (in 2013) and the main administrator of the International Plastic Surgery (IPS) Facebook group [4], I can witness the speed and efficacy of specialists from the field of plastic surgery in interacting with each other and exchanging ideas, videos, and images COMMUNICATIONS