Listening To The Public Health On Twitter

Does anybody hear you when you complain about your health online? Well get a load of "10 Things We Can Learn From Your Health-Related Twitter Rants" by Hans Villarica in The Atlantic. Really it's amazing what Johns Hopkins researchers were able to conclude simply by "listening" to 1.6 million tweets between May 2009 and October 2010. Click through the slideshow to learn about Twitter patterns and key takeaways on the flu, antibiotics, insomnia, Benedryl, allergies, aches and pains, obesity, cancer, and health insurance.

We're not involved in any such exquisite Twitter filtering or extrapolating, but we're huge fans and active users of the service. Just another tool that helps HyperbaricLink bring you the most trustworthy hyperbaric oxygen news on the web.

[Image: Michael J. Paul, Johns Hopkins University]

O2.0 is the news blog of HyperbaricLink, the independent web guide to hyperbaric oxygen therapy.

HyperbaricLink Weekly Roundup

This week, as our site developers worked some wizardry behind the curtain, we assessed the nation's hyperbaric preparedness for wars foreign and domestic. Ooh-rah to OxyHeal for aiding the US Department of Defense in its much-anticipated TBI investigations. Now who will rush to outfit our first responders and trauma centers on the home front? Wednesday we sure enjoyed a hot cup of Morning Joe with Autism Speaks co-founders Bob and Suzanne Wright. And yesterday we offered directory assistance to the burgeoning advanced wound care industry. In our spare time, via Twitter and twisted pair, we explored the wonderful world of mild or mHBOT, or personal hyperbarics, for some fun tweets and blogposts next week. Yet more providers and manufacturers got a load of our upcoming Profile+Plus offering. Contact us and we'll email you a link to our quick demo, or stay tuned for the promo and our first batch online. Stay safe and warm, dear reader, till Monday.

HyperbaricLink Weekly Roundup

This week we filed some new posts and tweets on familiar themes, while busily preparing our site for the New Year ahead. HCMC stepped up its fight to keep Hennepin County, the Twin Cities, and Minnesota fully prepared for carbon monoxide, smoke, and burn emergencies. Best Publishing ran a holiday sale. Kindred Hospital Kansas City won UHMS accreditation and an upgraded directory listing. We're also proud to have added ProHBO in Greater Atlanta (Marietta, GA) and made acquaintances with dozens of others. Select treatment centers and chamber manufacturers got a sneak peek at our new Profile+Plus feature. (The world at large needn't wait much longer.) And it was an especially productive week of social networking, as we enabled readers to preview our news and share nice with AddThis, studied up for a Facebook launch, and broke 1,000 followers on Twitter, where we tweeted, too, on topics ranging from home safety to chronic pain, migraine, flu vaccines, autism, lupus, fibromyalgia, and wound management. Thanks to all who corresponded, conversed, and commented.

Preface: Off Label, On Message

Please eavesdrop on our recent correspondences with O2.0 readers who feel that words like "investigational" and "off-label" might create the impression hyperbaric oxygen is strictly experimental or completely untested for indications not covered by insurance. The continuing conversation has informed both our diction and our outlook, as we prepare to expand our Conditions list well beyond the 13 UHMS-approved indications.

To one reader we wrote:

Besides safety, the FDA and insurers and HyperbaricLink visitors demand to know about efficacy, and proven efficacy is the only sure road to approval and reimbursement and wider practice. Of course what outcomes we can gather from the clinic and from growing bodies of lesser evidence matter, too. So while opinions and beliefs vary widely, and political and economic battles rage on, we'll be applying some hyperbaric pressure on the medical community to conduct bigger trials and publish more compelling evidence in bigger journals. Along the way, we're also here to connect healthcare consumers to clinicians who can treat them now, on or off label, as doctor and patient see fit.

We'll work extra hard going forward to be accurate and complete on this score. As the poet Wallace Stevens once wrote, "The accuracy of accurate letters is an accuracy with respect to the structure of reality." Quick, someone, go tweet that!

King Of Stop It Already

One of our Twitter followers just asked if it's too soon for jokes about hyperbaric chambers. Too late. Millions already posted, and Michael Jackson has been the talk of the UHMS conference all day, too. Is it just plain Bad or merely Human Nature that people can't help mocking celebrity or thumbing their noses at death?

O2.0 would rather suffer a metric ton of chatroom zingers than abide some of the drivel circulating today in the underground baromedical community. This is the first and last time, for example, we'll ever link to the so-called HBOT Truth blog.

Let's face it. Michael Jackson is all most people know about HBOT. We're totally okay with that. We wish them all long and happy lives. And we're right here when anyone wants the real HBOT truth, without any hidden identities or agendas. Till then we'll retweet any jokes that strike the right balance of irreverence and schadenfreude. Haven't found any yet.

Follow O2.0 On Twitter

You can't tweet in the same river twice. So long as one appreciates its Zen flow and odd meanderings, Twitter's turning into a great place to check the pulse of an active and growing HBOT community. We'll also be using Twitter for newsgathering, feedback, word-of-mouth advertising, and live feeds. Follow us here and we'll follow you anywhere.