Is There Room for TikTok in Medicine? A Young Clinician Explains

Of 91 hypertension-related videos analyzed from the popular video sharing app TikTok, less than half (47%) were presented by health care professionals and only 5% were presented by cardiologists, according to recent research presented at the American College of Cardiology’s (ACC) 71st Annual Scientific Session, held April 2-4, 2022. The study, "Evaluating hypertension-related content on TikTok: A social media analysis," was conducted by Nanda Siva, a third-year medical student at West Virginia University School of Medicine, and fellow medical students from West Virginia University and The George Washington University who were mentored by Arka Chatterjee, MD, associate professor of medicine at the University of Arizona.

Siva, who presented the study's findings at ACC 2022, recently sat down with Patient Care Online to dig deeper into why clinicians are not utilizing social media platforms and what the future could look like with medical information increasing in prominence on social media.