Tag Archive for: Facebook

MPN Patient Shares Survivorship Tips, Recognizing Social Media Toxicity

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MPN Patient Shares Survivorship Tips, Recognizing Social Media Toxicity from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.

 Myeloproliferative neoplasm (MPN) patient Julia Olff has experienced the positive and negative aspects of online information and social media in her search for support. Watch as she shares her support journey with what she found helpful and what became toxic in her efforts to gain MPN information and emotional support.

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Transcript:

Julia Olff:

So, I think social media has many advantages, especially when you have a rarer illness like myelofibrosis. I was diagnosed with myelofibrosis in 2008, and there really was not a lot of good information yet about the illness online, and I had not met anyone who had my myelofibrosis, so I really appreciated being able to go to places like Facebook in their earlier days, with my illness, to find organizations to find other people with the illness, I think learning from other people in terms of their strategies for coping with her illness, tips for dealing with side effects, and other people can answer questions about the physicians and nurses just can’t because they don’t experience it directly, how something feels sort of setting your expectations for a treatment can be really helpful, and I think that’s where social media really shines, is creating community and connecting it to others and learning from peers. The downsides though, I think, are the amount of opinion, unfounded opinion, not sourced opinion that exists that I saw on social media, and then the angry vitriol or kind of disagreement that I found really harmful to my mental health.

I’m always trying to balance how I feel with my mindset, and there are times that that’s easier to do, and times that that’s harder to do, so when I’ve been particularly unwell or just had a hospitalization, I feel like I have…I’m more vulnerable, I have less of a threshold for negativity and angry commentary, and that you can find that on social media, unfortunately, and then, of course, there’s… what I find troubling or not helpful are the opinions of other people who relay people who don’t necessarily have the depth of credible information about a treatment study, what’s right or wrong as it relates to the latest in myelofibrosis treatment, and treatment advances. So it’s helpful to hear about what it was like to have a stem cell transplant from someone with myelofibrosis, but yet I can’t rely on an individual for credible scientific medically sound information. So I think for me, I actually deleted my Facebook account in 2020, but I did keep my Twitter account because there I follow physicians’ epidemiologists, and of course, MPN organizations so that I can know about upcoming webinars or patient events, or new treatments. So that’s been really helpful.  

Cyber Hygiene – Peer Support in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism

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Unless you’re a visitor from another planet, you’ve probably seen or heard some news about the internet being a giant privacy sinkhole. Between the stories that first started to break in the Cambridge Analytica/Brexit aftermath, and the ongoing drip-drip-drip that is the “my phone is a snitch” stuff that seems to bring fresh scary headlines every day, it feels like anyone who has a social media presence of any kind has had their privacy violated in some way.

It’s tempting to just say, “who cares – I don’t do anything that anyone else cares about,” but that’s not really the case if you participate in online patient communities, particularly those that gather on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. The issue is particularly problematic for patient communities dealing with health issues that could impact their health insurance coverage, or their employment status, or even their lives, if the details of their health status were widely or publicly known.

An example of that risk could be someone who’s gay, but who works for an employer that has a public profile of being anti-LGBTQ. Someone in that situation, who participates in a Closed Facebook Group for people looking to share experiences on getting access to pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) medications to prevent HIV transmission, might think that a Closed Facebook Group would be a safe place to have those conversations, but Closed Groups – which were promoted by Facebook to community moderators as private community building tools – were subject to the same data privacy breach risk that the rest of Facebook became. Which means that a gay man in a Closed Group that serves as a community space for discussion of access to HIV preventive treatment could be outed to their anti-LGBTQ employer via data leakage from that “private” group … which was not really private at all.

There is rising awareness, and concern, in patient communities about this privacy issue, particularly related to Facebook Groups, which became the de facto place to establish peer health communities over the last decade. An advocacy group called The Light Collective is looking to build a safe harbor for patient groups to build community without sacrificing members’ privacy, but until that harbor is built, what’s a patient community to do? And what about just-plain-people, the ones called “patients” – what’s their path to privacy in the surveillance age?

Here are my suggestions for enhancing your privacy online:

The internet is a boon to humanity when it comes to access to information, and democratization of knowledge. However, along with access to information, we’ve also gotten disinformation, trolls, and cyber-surveillance at scale. Peer to peer communities, particularly in healthcare, are critical to accessing good information, and emotional support when dealing with serious illness. However, data privacy is not guaranteed in any way on social media platforms. Caveat emptor – let the user beware. And modify their settings accordingly.

Peer to Peer Health Networks, Trust … and Facebook

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Unless you’ve been visiting another planet lately, you’ve probably seen a headline or two (or maybe fifty) about the rising sense that the social network called Facebook might not be trustworthy when it comes to data privacy for the network’s users. Not that the barrage of headlines over the last year have been the first time the company has had to go into crisis communications mode over data privacy issues – there was a dustup over user privacy that led to a US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) consent decree in 2011, which Facebook has apparently ignored in the ensuing eight years – but the current contretemps over betraying user privacy makes the 2011 headlines look like a radar blip.

The impact on Facebook patient communities, who have made extensive use of the Facebook Groups product to gather together to provide support and resources for people dealing with conditions from ALS to rare disease to hereditary cancer risk, is only just starting to break through the noise over the Cambridge Analytica story, which was how the privacy leaks on the platform were first discovered. The ongoing saga of “did the Russians hack the 2016 election,” with Facebook’s likely, if (maybe) unwitting, part in that, adds to the thundering chorus of “what the heck, Zuckerberg” that’s echoing across the globe.

Peer to peer health advice has become part of any person-who-finds-themselves-a-patient’s self-advocacy routine – just ask internet geologist Susannah Fox, who has made a successful career out of observing what people do with the information access bonanza known as “The Internet.” Facebook has become the go-to platform where people gather to discuss their health issues, usually in Closed or Secret Groups, where all kinds of deeply personal and intimate details of their lives, and health conditions, get shared. Discovering that those personal, intimate details had basically been released into the wilds of the web, willy-nilly, with no way to track where that data wound up, has rocked communities around the world who relied on Facebook to provide the connections they’ve come to depend on to manage their health conditions.

In the slow-motion train wreck that the reveal of this data leakage/breach has been, cybersecurity researchers Andrea Downing and Fred Trotter get a lot of credit for digging into the Facebook API to figure out how a Closed Group could become a data-slurping bonanza for any jackass on the internet. Trotter and health-tech legal eagle David Harlow filed a complaint with the FTC, co-signed by Downing and bioinformatics guru Matt Might, spelling out exactly how Facebook had played fast and loose with their Terms of Service for the product, and also allowing their Developer platform to become a data-miner’s paradise with a “there are no rules, really” accountability framework when it came to data snagging.

Since discovering the security vulnerability in 2018, reporting it to Facebook, getting what amounted to a “so what?” response from the platform, and then trying to figure out how to keep community members’ data safe, Andrea Downing, along with Fred Trotter, David Harlow and, full disclosure, yours truly, along with a host of other patient activists, have formed a collective to figure out how to create a community platform for patient communities *off* of Facebook. Stay tuned for updates, that’s going to be a big job, and it’s going to take time and some serious deep thinking and heavy lifting.

In a piece on the Tincture health channel on Medium, “Our Cancer Support Group On Facebook Is Trapped,” Andrea spells out the issue clearly, emphasizing that the promise of connected community that Facebook offered exists nowhere else … yet. And until it does, patient communities are indeed trapped on the network, since that’s still where they get and give the support so deeply needed by people who get a diagnosis, and who want to find out from someone who’s been there, done that, what their own future might hold.

It’s not an easy-to-solve problem, this betrayal of trust that creates a pressing need for the creation of a safe harbor. I’m putting it before you on the Patient Empowerment Network since I know that everyone who reads the pieces posted here has a stake in peer to peer health, and the trust framework that’s required for peer health resources to be effective. If trust is the new network effect, it’s incumbent on those of us who advocate for robust online peer interaction in health, and healthcare, to call for more trustworthy platforms to support our work.

Let’s get on that.

Introducing Our New Facebook Community: Empowered Patient Chat

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We are excited to announce that our new Facebook group is now live, and waiting for you to join! This new online community builds on the success of our Empowered Patient Chat (#patientchat) tweetchat and aims to extend the discussion beyond Twitter and engage a larger population of patients and caregivers on Facebook.

Living with a disease or other chronic condition is challenging for patients, their families and friends. The Empowered #patientchat strives to engage and empower patients and caregivers by connecting them with each other, sharing resources and inspiration across conditions, and exploring important topics of interest to those in healthcare who want to elevate the patient voice in all healthcare matters. The community is guided by a belief in keeping the patient perspective at the forefront of all healthcare interactions, the strength of peer support, and the power of shared decision making in healthcare. 

Empowered Patient Chat (#patientchat) is a community of patients, caregivers, and healthcare professionals, interested in achieving their best health possible by discussing topics of interest in healthcare from a patient’s perspective. 

Topics of interest have included:

  • Including Patients and Care Partners: Let’s Talk Healthcare Conferences
  • Overcoming Disparity in Clinical Trials
  • Are We Missing the Mark with Patient Involvement
  • Understanding Medical Research
  • How Does Technology Benefit Patients
  • How to Include Patients in Design
  • What to Do When No One Will Listen
  • Caring for the Whole Person
  • Self-Care Goals
  • Managing Stress of Being a Patient
  • and more…

Join our group today

Thanks to Social Media, Rare Progress on Rare Diseases

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This post was written by Meredith Salisbury for Techonomy.com and was originally published on July, 26, 2016.

Rare DiseaseSolving any disease is hard, but solving rare disease is a special kind of torture. Take everything that must be accomplished with any old disease—What causes it? Under what circumstances? Who does it affect? How can we prevent it or cure it?—and then toss in a scarcity of cases. When doctors don’t see enough patients with the same condition, just recognizing that there are commonalities between them is a major challenge. How do you put together a useful clinical trial with a few hundred patients when there might only be 50 people in the world with a particular disease?

That’s why any advance in how we identify and treat rare disease is cause for celebration. Recently, social media has been a big part of many of those advances. Patients with these diseases are for the first time able to reach across geographic and cultural borders to band together, giving critical mass to efforts like fundraising and clinical trial enrollment that might otherwise wither away. The same technology that lets us fund glowing plants or find fellow cake-decorating enthusiasts may turn out to be the weapon that takes down many rare diseases.

Corrie Painter was on the path to earning her PhD in biochemistry when she was diagnosed with angiosarcoma, a rare form of cancer inside the blood vessels that affects just a few hundred people globally each year. Fewer than a third of patients diagnosed with angiosarcoma will be alive five years later. Six years later, Painter has beaten the odds—but when she speaks about life immediately after diagnosis, one of the things she remembers most is searching online for other patients fighting the same disease. Most of the people she tracked down in these searches had already succumbed to the cancer. Rare disease is tremendously isolating, and patients like Painter learn quickly that few people can truly understand their story.

Today, the angiosarcoma community is vibrant and connected, due in large part to Painter’s efforts. She helped put together a Facebook group for patients or people interested in the disease; it now has more than 2,000 members. At a moment’s notice, they can offer advice to fellow patients, share the latest research news, agree to participate in trials, and more. Painter also cofounded a nonprofit, Angiosarcoma Awareness, that coordinates fundraising for the disease. By gathering the small world of people affected by angiosarcoma, she has made possible what no individual could do alone: raised significant amounts of money on a regular basis to accelerate research into the disease and potential treatments.

As the opportunity for building rare disease communities through social media becomes evident, many people are following the same path. Sonia Vallabh was diagnosed at age 27 with a genetic mutation that makes it a virtual certainty she will develop the same rare prion disease that killed her mother. She and her husband, Eric Minikel, launched a blog and a nonprofit called the Prion Alliance to spur fundraising efforts and provide a source of relevant news and updates for other patients with a range of prion diseases. In 2014, Techonomy covered the remarkable identification of the first several patients with a newly discovered disease; many of those patients were found after the first patient’s parents blogged about the unexpected diagnosis.

To be sure, advocacy groups successfully built rare disease communities long before social media existed. One organization, Genetic Alliance, has been particularly important in assisting rare disease foundations by providing much-needed resources and training in patient advocacy, clinical trials, and more. But as genome sequencing is used to solve more and more medical mystery cases, the rate at which rare diseases are being discovered is increasing.

These new diseases—seen in a single patient, or maybe a few patients—require every tool available to establish communities and resources for supporting patients and developing treatments. As more people sign up for consumer genomic services or online genealogy platforms that allow for connecting with other users, this kind of progress might occur even faster. Rare disease research has long been hobbled by the lack of funding from government agencies with broad mandates. As patients build real communities and organize their efforts, there is good reason to believe that many of these diseases can eventually be targeted and overcome.

Salisbury, Meredith. “Thanks to Social Media, Rare Progress on Rare Diseases – Techonomy.” Techonomy. N.p., 26 July 2016. Web. 18 Oct. 2016. <http://techonomy.com/2016/07/for-rare-diseases-social-media-can-achieve-rare-results/>.