7 benefits of becoming a doctor.

You get heaps of professional satisfaction, every passing day. You manage to transform despondent faces to the ones that radiate sheen. You manage to help someone duke out that pessimism and roar back in life. A doctor may not get all the cakes and ale in life; but on the professional frontier, he is a winner on most of the days.

You are generally taken with mighty respect. Generally people consider doctors to be noble and selfless chaps. And generally, people are right when setting their opinions. Barring exceptions, the prevailing lot of doctors is sensible, compassionate and hard-working.

You get to meet a lot of new faces daily. Social insulation might never occur to a doctor, as the prevailing equation of demand-supply ratio is in favor of doctors. By meeting strangers every day and offering them a slice of life, as a doctor, one increases one’s chances of blending in life quite easily.

You understand the importance of being punctual and being regular. As doctors, we have to be there on time, every time. It might not prove to be a sabbath’s day journey in the initial days; however, as the time passes, you don’t need an alarm clock or a manual reminder. You are always on a programmed mode.

People look up to you as a role model. I am not saying that doctors are the only role models of the society; the list of provisional role models is packed like sardines - soldiers, scientists, farmers, honest officers, teachers to mention a few. Being a doctor attracts a plethora of attached emotions; you are looked upon as one of the more responsible citizens of the country. People come up to you to take advices. Kids want to emulate you when they grow up.

People want to befriend you. I must say that in India, there is still a large mental gap between a doctor and non-medico population. A lot of times I feel that my patients get elated when I ask them about their lives, their families and their own spaces. It’s a common perception that a doctor doesn’t make friends easily; though with the changing mind-sets, advent of sophisticated communication channels and evolution of social media machinery, the feeling is fading fast.

Your voice is being sought after. People want to know the reality behind printed medical news, which so often contradicts itself if all the versions are put together. People want to know your opinion about their genuine illnesses; people trust you verbatim. In most of the cases you don’t have to stress a point to make it feel relevant; the fact that you said it twice is enough for a patient to realize its importance.

You can't censor my thoughts. Can you?

Why do people have to judge incessantly? Why do people have insecurities that drive them to think in egregiously biased manners? Why cant people just sit back and observe with an open mind?

Can you really imagine your posts, your pics being subjected to scrutiny before you are able to upload them? To me it sounds something bizarre to say the least, and I am sure most of the geeks out there would share an opinion like that. To deal with a small bunch of nuisance-makers, this would rather be a tough blow to the ordinary social media user.

Unpractical, flawed and undemocratic.

And I just read at one of the credible portals that Indian ministers want the scrutiny process to be done manually. So if that ever comes to see the light of the day, the honest taxpayer would be someone at highest loss. There are a lot of brighter ways to spend the national resources; invest in strengthening infrastructure, create more chances for the betterment of life-quality, make food cheaper and most widely available, check out the tentacles of corruption, fight inflation, give wings to the dreams of underprivileged and what not?

Our facebook profiles should not get unnecessarily poked; the right to express must not be compromised. More than 35 million tweets are sent by Indians per day and you want to scan those using human methods before they get posted. That typically mars the basic usability of such commendable web portal.

In the times of calamities, twitterati have used the site to provide commendable help resources in very short time. Facebook provides a working vent for all of us suffering with emotional fatigue. Now just imagine, can you really wait for your family album to get a nod from some of the authorities before you decide to share it with your close friends?

Please don’t snatch our rights of speaking and be heard to. It would not help to screen our social media content before we post them. Not only does it sound rude, it also defies some of the basic rights that we possess as humans.

A Check-list Before You Start Writing Your Biography

Make sure to keep it non-controversial, unless, of course, you are eyeing some short lived media attention and long lived grudges.

Don’t let the text be loud, allow the sub-text to rule the mood.

Sit with your family and friends more often. Observe them closely and ask them for old-forgotten memories.

Visit the significant places you have ever been. In all likelihoods, you would find some new thing and recollect some nostalgia.

Click a lot of photographs and keep all the albums handy. Devote a lot of time looking out at the pictures; the childhood pics, college pics, marriage pics, ceremonial pics, holiday trip pics, family pics etc.

Divide the events of your life in some chapters and treat each chapter as a separate entity, an al-inclusive one.

Get a basic hold on Microsoft Word (or any other tool that you prefer for the similar application).

Keep a diary with you; if you are well versed taking notes on your smart-phone, it will be as good if not better.

Make a schedule of writing; aim to write daily. In the scheduled writing hour, prefer to not do anything else; even if you are suffering with writer’s block of the day, don’t keep the pen down. You can anyway refine the raw notes at a later stage.

Keep breathing space in your writing schedule. You have to be at your thinking best so offering yourself deadlines serves no real purpose.

Talk to your old friends, and if they allow, record their conversations about your togetherness.
Always keep a backup of your soft copy.

Tie up with an editor, and explain him about the job before you press the ‘hiring now’ button.

Buzz your social network about your progress in writing the biography. It will keep your close ones informed and you might get some motivation by their comments and feedbacks.

Keep the narration simple, and don’t breach its integrity.

Refrain from using opulent, flowery words. The aim is to ensure an easy comprehension.

Avoid going high on artificial stimulants to get a high (read excess coffee, tea, alcohol, nicotine); the flow is just the best when you are truly in pulchritude.

If possible, start each chapter with a theme quote. The quote can be your own. PS: I am using this strategy for my own biography.

A Doctor and A Tweet.

Twitter is something that always astonishes me. If facebook is akin to a coffee house, twitter is no less than a parliament. The joy is boundless the moment you come across 140 characters typed by someone you hold immense respect for. You get to know the real thing, no media manoeuvrings, no added floss or deprived gloss. You don’t have to gain the permission to get a glance over anybody’s view, except for the random souls who believe in ironies – being on twitter and keeping your tweets protected. There aren’t a lot of doctors that use twitter regularly; I have came across a lot of profiles that belong to the health care fraternity, but to my dismay, either the profiles were made in the quest to keep pace with the advancing social media engineering where the user had made little efforts to keep and stay updated, or the profiles were fake identities, created by marketing czars to advertise about the newest kid in the town of wonder diets.

If you want to be on twitter and make the most of it, you have to keep on tweeting. Tweeting is expressing your thoughts, ideas and observations in 140 characters or less at a time. The more you tweet, the more buzz you create and more credible your online presence becomes. Twitter is a practical and powerful tool as it gives you the power to express your thought and send it to any chosen user in a moment of time. You can retweet to spread the thoughts expressed by any other user as well; your timeline (the synagogue of facebook wall) gives you a compact view of all the tweets posted by people you choose to follow. Like a tweet? Now you have plenty of options; retweet it or put in a reply or type your views and send it to your choice of end listeners. However, things don’t work on auto-pilot mode all the time; you have the power to plan the delivery of your tweets but you have to browse every now and then to know about the twitter trends. What is a twitter trend? A twitter trend is a word or phrase that is been most talked about in the world of twitter. There are different twitter trends for various geographical locations and are hugely inspire by the events happening in various places. Did I hear someone say twitter is the public spittoon? It is indeed a myopic view. Twitter opens countless minds in front of you; the more you read, the more you learn.

Maximal Invasive Reach; Web strategy for doctors

With the advent of new-era communicative tools, findings things of relevance has not remained a tough nut to crack. People all over search the internet for things that interests them and make their opinions about. I think it’s important in today’s fast-paced and interconnected world for a doctor to make some use of various collaborative tools in the web world. It won’t just leverage the quantum and authenticity of their practice but in turn would be helpful for the patients as well. Suppose, someone is desperately searching for competent oncologists in his / her area and he googles it, there are high chances that he will be connected to the profiles of some of the specialists in the region, who may or may not be super experts. Now the choice is limited as the person in need is unlikely to personally visit every specialist and form an opinion to select the best. Here role of web presence matters a lot.

By understanding the need of projecting your special interests and capabilities as a clinician, you can help patients in dire need of your services and believe me its not a web developer’s job to highlight your profile or to enhance your web reach. By virtue of simple tools (your personal website, basic social networking tools i.e. facebook, linkedin etc, bookmarking tools i.e. stumbleupon, delicious etc), the profile’s visibility can be increased multifold. If you can write a blog, make it a point to do it regularly and keep on updating about your professional inclinations and techniques. If the target audience is a patient, the goal should be to equip him / her with the knowledge and options of various treatment modes.

The top trends in web and social media usage of internet tools are increase in the number of websites that target to social networking of health care professionals only & a high rise in web version availability of all medical and scientific journals. Its high time that we start contributing actively our scientific papers to online journals that would add up the credibility and serve as a cornerstone for our patient in his / her selection of care provider. Patients are looking for authoritative but personal information to help them navigate all of the health information they find in today’s media, and I find that using social media helps me to reach more than just the patient in my exam room, hopefully saving patients and parents unnecessary anxiety and saving physicians and other health care providers unnecessary visits.