SOCIAL MEDIA

Social media; A tool for democratizing health

‘An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.’- Benjamin Franklin.

I was overcome with extreme gloom and great melancholy that fateful morning. A distraught mother rushed her 17yr old daughter into the ER (emergency  room) screaming for help.The girl was extremely pale and her breathing was labored. Her conjunctiva was so yellow that I picked up the jaundice from a mile away.

She had been told by a neighbor that drinking a mixture of akpeteshie and camphor would cure her chicken pox in a matter of hours with no scarring from the rash. She had tried the magic potion and the results was the reason why she was in the ER

Her liver was failing , she was hemolysing. We had to quickly intervene with a blood transfusion and some liver protective treatments to prevent her untimely demise. She survived but she had other problems; she could not pay her hospital bills. Her parents had no money for that.The management for chicken pox costs next to nothing since it is self limiting but her taking of the magic potion had brought the extra cost, the cost of ignorance. She was lucky ,she did not have to pay the ultimate price, with her life. Indeed the people of God were perishing for lack of knowledge.

Two weeks later the girl was discharged home fully recovered.It did not take two weeks for her to recover, that took just 5 days.She spent the rest of the days looking for money to pay her bills until the hospital staff had mercy on her and made contribution to pay for her.

This teenager’s own is just one of the many cases that could have been easily prevented with health education. In third world countries like our own where healthcare delivery is wretched, our ‘nuclear weapon’ should be prevention. Not getting the disease in the first place is the perfect cure. Unfortunately, we do not have the money and resources for health education.The first time most Ghanaians get to hear about how to prevent a disease is when they are on admission at the hospital, with the same disease of course. Some do not even live to apply what they learn.

The solution to this issue escaped me for a long time till the day I got enough money to buy a smartphone. I started enjoying the delights of social media apps such as Instagram,Facebook,Twitter and the likes. Then it struck me. Most people own a smartphone these days. Even if they do not own one they know someone who does and they have used it to access social media before. Secondly, stuff that show up on social media tend to spread like wild fire.....if they are bad or scandalous but most people think medicine is bad anyway and that’s scandalous. Hence, I found my solution to the problem .Social media was the solution. The answer to putting the power of the masses over their health into their own hands. The tool to democratize health.

The public health programs  such as the national AIDS control program, national tuberculosis control program, immunization programs can all be advertised with social media. Health talks can be posted on social media instead of ‘sex tapes’. Awareness for breast cancer and cervical cancer can be done every single day of the year using social media. We do not need to wait for special weeks or months to create awareness.We do not have to wait for an Ebola outbreak before we get creative. Prevention has always been the preferred way of dealing with diseases and every other problem in life and social media can play a great role.

So the  17 year old girl would not have gone through this traumatic experience , an experience which in itself can give her PTSD(post traumatic stress disorder) another serious condition, if social media had ‘health tapes’ instead of sex tapes. Democracy is the preferred way of governance so let us not make healthcare a dictatorship. Let us use social media to democratize healthcare.

E.Y.