Lists of Medical Bloggers and Twitters Categorized by Specialty

Following medical bloggers in your specialty or field of interest has become essential nowadays but good bloggers are hard to find.

In addition, most doctors and other health workers are quite busy and, for example, there are not many blogging allergists around.

The lists of medical bloggers and Twitters categorized by specialty is a good starting point. The links to those lists are shown below:

1. Medical Twitters List Categorized by Specialty: Top Twitter Doctors

This is a list of the Top Twitter Doctors arranged by specialty in alphabetical order - feel free to add your own suggestions. The list is open to anybody to edit:

One of the first lists of doctors on Twitter was started at by Dawson King, then relocated at HealthTechnica (Health Care Professional’s Social Network List), and is now found here at TwitterDoctors.net

The list used to be arranged by specialty but @dawson has simplified its latest version by removing the medical specialty category, opting for "influence" instead (a screenshot from 07/11/2010 is shown below),

2. Medical Bloggers List Categorized by Specialty:

The list is maintained by the blogger WhiteCoat Rants.

If you are not on the list, do not despair, email the blog authors, and if your request is legitimate, they will add you to the list.

Medical Blogs and Twitter for Professional Networking

Dawson King, the former author of Medical Student Blog shares a few personal examples of the indirect benefits brought by Twitter in terms of professional networking and career advancement (at the end, Dawson chose a different path from going to medical school):

Within a couple of weeks of publishing the list I was contacted by Dr. Mohammad Al-Ubaydli @idiopathic who had from my tweets, stumbled on to my blog and in-turn been able to access my resume to see my IT background. From here, he sent me a direct message via twitter and asked if I was interested in speaking to him regarding helping with Patients Know Best, an open source personal health records project; a few hours later we were talking on the phone and by the next day I was helping build the Wiki architecture and templates. This eventually led to me attending and helping him with a series of Wiki Medicine lectures at UCL.

The evening before the first lecture, I tweeted “@medicalstudent I can’t wait for tomorrow, going to UCL for the first lecture in Wiki Medicine by Dr. Mohammad Al-Ubaydli”. Within an hour I had received a response from Dr. Simon Brownleader @brownleader inviting me to shadow him at his Surgery in Camden, prior to the lectures at UCL. Again, within a few hours we had swapped numbers and sure enough the following day I found myself sitting next to a qualified GP getting valuable experience that I can now put on my application to medical school.

As a pre/medical student Twitter can open so many doors, just remember to be pro-active, network, sociable and most of all have fun.

Video: Twitter in Plain English by CommonCraft.

References:
A comprehensive list of U.S. Hospitals that use YouTube, Facebook, Twitter or Other Social Networks. Ed Bennett.
Twitter, a medical student’s best friend. Medical Student Blog.
Image source: picturestation.net, free license.