Free Open-Access Medical Education in Emergency Medicine

Over the past 20 years the Internet has spawned a huge number of blogs, podcasts, videos and wikis on a countless number of topics and emergency medicine has been no exception.1 At the intersection of social media and critical care, the astoundingly popular Free Open-Access Medical Education (FOAM), or #FOAMed, movement has emerged as a force to be reckoned with.2 According to Symplur, which tracks healthcare-related hashtags, there were almost 900 million Twitter impressions containing the #FOAMed hashtag in 2014. (See Figure 1.) At the June 2015 Social Media and Critical Care Conference in Chicago, the "tribes" of critical care providers from prehospital, emergency, intensive care and anesthesia converged from around the world to share their passion for emergency medicine, resuscitation and critical care. But not everyone was happy. Around the world, attending physicians have complained their residents are questioning authority. They complain FOAM isn't peer reviewed3 and can even be dangerous.4 Ironically this is a frequently discussed topic among those who participate in FOAM. Some counter that peer review is highly political and susceptible to appeals to authority, and that guideline-writing panels can be "stacked" with physicians of a particular viewpoint or industry funding. An interesting comparison can be found in Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman's explanation about why the real action in economics is happening in the blogosphere and not in peer-review...
Source: JEMS Special Topics - Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: Tags: News Administration and Leadership Education & Training Technology Source Type: news