The pot calling the kettle black - NP social media edition

Midlevels with an ounce of common sense and professional decorum are hard to come by these days, although NP Kathleen here might be a rare exception. Indeed, the vast majority of physicians would raise both eyebrows if one of their patients found them on social media and started asking questions about their care. And then there's the whole mess of medicolegal issues with regard to professionalism, personal safety/invasion of privacy, and the potential for HIPAA violations, especially if a physician were to respond back over social media.

Despite this, a frightening amount of midlevels (particularly nurse practitioners) seem to sleep perfectly fine at night after consulting social media for answers to clinical conundrums that their feeble brains can't begin to solve, even after doing useless "capstone projects" and completing 500+ rigorous hours of clinical "training" that would make a 3rd/4th-year medical student blush. Indeed, it is perhaps a bit presumptuous for Kathleen to assume that her fellow colleagues would never share vaginal issues or pictures of rashes. Because it's not like pictures of vaginal discharge or entire body regions in an attempt to show a rash couldn't potentially be used/abused as personal identifiable information, right? Don't believe us? We'll let the posts below speak for themselves. (Side note: it's a sad fucking state of affairs when a midlevel nurse practitioner can't even identify shingles, despite the patient handing you the diagnosis on a goddamn silver platter.)

The most egregious examples, one of which is shown below, involve nurse practitioners posting full, uncensored headshots of other people's children in a cry for help identifying a rash. Do the parents know that their child's supposedly trusted healthcare provider is posting photos of their kids online in a public Facebook group with more than 21,000 members, for the entire internet to see, gawk at, and comment on, and potentially be abused and exploited for even more nefarious purposes? In order to protect the identity and safety of the innocent child whose face is visible in the photos posted by NP Debbie Conner, we've heavily censored them.

So there you have it, folks. If you don't want to end up with sensitive photos of your nether regions or even worse, high-resolution photos of your children's faces that could end up in the hands of a sexual predator dwelling in a basement somewhere, it's in your best interest to entrust your healthcare to a trusted physician who relies on their knowledge and training to safely and effectively practice medicine instead of a clueless nurse practitioner or other midlevel who uses Facebook as their first-line medical reference.