Yesterday I received an email from #publichealthninja Camilo Erazo with a social media toolkit for a health and poverty conference taking place in Chile.  Not yet speaking Spanish (I'm working on it), I couldn't follow the program.  The hashtag #saludypobreza was in Spanish as well.

Chrome usually picks up on foreign language content and offers to translate it.  The results from the twitter search for #saludypobreza however were interpreted as English, since I was coming from the US search page.

I found two (now three) solutions using Chrome.

Solution 1:

Install the Google Translate extension.

Go to the Twitter search page for  saludypobreza and press the translate button.

Solution 2:

Or add a translate button for a specific language.

Go to the Twitter search page for saludypobreza and press the translate button.

Solution 3:

As I was writing this I thought of another solution. Go directly to the Twitter search page adding the Spanish language argument.

Thanks to #publichealthninja Cisco Grajales for asking if I had blogged this.  Great idea.  Done.

Do you know of other solutions or apps that translate Twitter feeds for following hashtags or events?

A recent study published in the International Journal of Medical Informatics found that young physicians overwhelmingly turn to Google and Wikipedia when searching for clinical information.  There isn't even a peer-reviewed resource in the top 3.   PubMed, largest biomedical literature database in the world, doesn't even make the top 5.

At first glance, this appears quite frightening.  It conjures images of an exam where your physician stops and says, "Now is this benign or malignant? Let me check Wikipedia first."  As an aside, I wonder how many physicians now have patients telling them, "I'm not sure if this is the best course of treatment. I read on Wikipedia that..."

Regardless, conclusions cannot be drawn from merely looking at resource choice.  Physicians undergo years of rigorous training.  Residency is notoriously brutal.  By the time a physician is in practice, he or she is a walking medical encyclopedia, attached to a neural network with the most advanced semantic and natural language processing algorithms in existence, which has the ability to learn and adapt based on personal and shared experiences.  And, they have taken the Hippocratic Oath, a feature that has yet to be incorporated into any medical decision-support system of which I am aware.

Perhaps these young physicians are simply using the the search tools they find most effective.  In the study, respondants cited accessibility to up to date information and ease of use are primary motivations.  Should a physician be questioned for choosing Google as a search engine, when 72% of the U.S. market does as well.  Additionally, large corporations, academic institutions, hospitals, as well as state and federal agencies use Google search technology.

The more precise question may be, "What is the physician's final source for information?"  Google Search provides links and exerpts, not the information itself.

Perhaps, these physicians are looking for something else.  What do 4 of the 5 top choices for young physicians have in common?  Answer - They foster an online community through enabling contribution and discussion.

That will be the topic of the next post, "The New Triumvirate in Research."