 Before posting anything, you should always ask yourself, should I be posting this? It was only after the med student tweeted about it that she got in trouble. Welcome back to the channel, everybody. For those of you who are new around here, my name is Michael, aka Dr. Chalini, and I am a board certified diagnostic and an original radiologist in New Jersey. On today's video, I wanted to talk about something that I heard recently involving a med student and a harmful interaction with a patient. And even though I mentioned it on a prior podcast episode, I wanted to do a video entirely devoted to this topic and go into a little more depth on it. So enough babbling, let's go ahead and get into the video. Let's go. All right, so we are just going to jump in on what exactly happened with this particular situation. So a fourth year med student out of my former state of North Carolina, and more specifically, Wake Forest University, was doing blood draws on a patient. And if you don't know anything on how hospitals work, blood draws are usually done by the phlebotomist or a nurse. However, a lot of times med students will do their own IVs and blood draws on patients because it helps them learn. And after all, this is a teaching hospital and they are there for a learning experience. And also depending on what hospital you are at during your residency, you may do them there as well. So any sort of practice up to that point will help you. During my first year of residency or my internship, I did a ton of blood draws and IVs. So again, any practice you get in med school will be advantageous. So back to the story. She was performing a blood draw on a patient and the patient noticed a pin on her white coat saying, see my pronoun. The patient laughed loudly and said, quote, she, her. Well, of course it is. What other pronoun is there? It, so let's stop there. Again, those are not my words. Those are the words of the patients. I'm quoting this for the purpose of the video. So this kind of interaction happens with patients all the time. As you can imagine, not all interactions with patients are good ones. It's just part of the profession. We deal with difficult patients sometimes and even the occasional patient that tries to assault you. It's just part of the job. And I'm not saying it's a good part of the job or even remotely one of my favorite parts of the job, but it is still a part of the job nonetheless. And part of med school and residency is learning how to deal with these kinds of situations because like I mentioned, not all patient interactions are amazing. And I'm trying to put in a pen in the story because I want to make a point here. And the point I'm trying to make is that not all of the patients acting this way are doing it intentionally and we can't lose sight of that. Every patient comes from a different walk of life and may have different views or ideologies, some of which may be extreme and some patients are more outspoken than others, but ultimately you should treat the patient the same regardless of the aforementioned. And the reason we should do this, well, there are many reasons, but one of them is because the patient may not be in control of their actions. They may be demented. They may have mental illness. They may be intoxicated or they may be heavily medicated. As healthcare professionals, we must treat all patients the same in a professional manner. I think every single healthcare professional watching this video right now can comment with an example of when a patient made fun of them or said something extreme to them or even tried to hit them. And please comment below if you've experienced any of these things and you're a healthcare worker. And what happens when these sort of things happen? Well, you just keep going about your day. And I do wanna make myself clear here. I am not by any means saying that this behavior should be part of our job, but unfortunately it kind of is. And we don't have any control of patients actions. So why am I bringing all of this up? Well, for one, this medical student didn't handle the situation in the best manner in my opinion. That's what she did after the interaction that prompted an investigation in the first place. So what did she do? She took to social media, specifically the cesspool that is Twitter. And she tweeted the following, I had a patient I was doing a blood draw on, see my pronoun pen and laugh loudly to the staff. She, her, well, of course it is. What other pronouns even are there? It, and then she went on to say the most important part of this tweet, which was, I missed his vein so he had to get stuck twice. Prying emoji. So let's analyze this tweet a little bit. She's responding to a tweet about transphobia with her own example. The problem is she's talking about an interaction with one of her patients. Now this isn't exactly HIPAA because she doesn't include any specific patient information or have any way to identify that specific patient, but she is quoting a private conversation she had with a patient and putting it on social media. So while that doesn't fall in the realm of HIPAA, that's kind of that ethical gray area. And like I said, the second line of this tweet is what sent off all the red flags. I missed the vein so we had to get stuck twice. Okay, so this is the problem with social media. This tweet could be interpreted a million different ways. And if we know anything about Twitter, we know that anything that you say that could have different interpretations or interesting undertones will be blown up in every possible polarizing manner. This tweet was no different. So did she intentionally miss the vein in order to hurt the patient, to get back to the patient for making fun of her pen? Or did she feel bad for missing the vein twice? Is that a sad emoji or a sarcastic one? You see what I mean here? It's the second line of this tweet that can have many, many meanings. And as you can imagine, Twitter took it and ran with it. Just for an example, the Libs of TikTok account with over 600,000 followers on Twitter said, tagged wait for school medicine and said, fourth year Med student says she abused a patient because he laughed at her pronoun pen. She has since deleted her account. So this is what happens as we know on Twitter, somebody tweets something out, someone identifies it, and then a big account tweets it out and they usually will tag the school or the person's occupation or whatnot. So what did wait for us have to say about this tweet? This was the original response once the school found out. Wait for us school of medicine said in a statement, the actions described in the student social media posts do not in any way reflect the quality of care and compassion that wait for us university school of medicine strives to provide to our patients each and every day. We stand behind our values that include trust, excellence and space where all belong and we can actively reinforce those values with learners and providers the school said. While federal law does not permit us to share specific information, we are taking the proper measures to address the matter with the student school leadership is involved. So now that we had that generic response from the school, what was everybody else on Twitter saying? Well, in case you're wondering, here's some of the quotes or retweets that I found. Let's read the first one. The student needs to be expelled and the police needs to be notified. If the school does not handle this appropriately, I hope the patient sues the student and the school. Next, this individual simply cannot be trusted to the patient. They need to be removed from the program, nothing else. How about one more? I'm not ever going to let a doctor from this school become involved in any aspect of my medical care. This one student seriously degraded the reputation of the entire university with a single tweet. See how powerful these tweets are? Wait for us now has a reputation of their graduates assaulting patients. And what about the other people who saw it a little differently? Well, one commenter said, doctors miss my veins all the time. It's not malpractice to be human. Another said, is there any indication this was deliberate? And another user asked, it's dumb and unethical to post about it. But it seems like it could also just be an amusing coincidence. I'm sure y'all know how much it sucks when people interpret ambiguous comments as proof of your malicious character. Later on down the road, when they were investigating this a little further, the school actually mentioned that she did not recall the incident accurately in her tweet. They stated the following. Our documentation verifies that after the student physician was unsuccessful in obtaining the blood draw, the student appropriately deferred a second attempt to one of our certified professionals. The student did not attempt a blood draw again. The school reportedly wrote. So what exactly happened to the student? Well, the student was ultimately placed on a leave of absence as a result of inappropriate and a misleading post. This is all according to a statement that the university put out. The student involved actually put out a long apology in the university campus paper in which she basically blamed being inexperienced and saying she never intended harm to the patient. Here is her full apology. For the event mentioned in the tweet, I was performing a blood draw on a patient and during our conversation, they had shown dismay at my pronoun pen. Del Rosario wrote in her statement. I calmly shared my thoughts about the pronouns and did not escalate the situation further. When I was doing the blood draw, I missed the first time due to my inexperience as a student and per our policy, my supervisor performed the successful blood draw the second time. During this encounter, I never intended to harm the patient. Okay, so now that we've heard both sides of the argument, what exactly do I think about this whole situation? Well, I'm going to give her the benefit of the doubt here because I doubt that she was maliciously poking the patient multiple times on purpose. What probably happened is just like the article stated. She was clearly upset with what the patient said to her and she wanted to tell the Twitter world what happened, which again, probably not the best idea to share a conversation that you had with a patient on social media, regardless of how good or bad it was. She then likely tried to get Venus access, which she couldn't, which isn't uncommon for someone who is learning. However, if she didn't just feel the need to post this on social media in the first place, she would have never been in this situation. So therein lies the problem. Why even post to social media in the first place? And while we're on this topic, let's talk about med school and how they don't prepare any med student for using social media. And they most certainly should, especially with how popular social media is today and how common it is to see a healthcare worker on social media. It's a blessing to be able to reach a large portion of the public. You can educate them and even market yourself or practice. But it's also a curse because even one small mess up can have career altering effects, especially in medicine. I personally think it's very important for physicians to get involved in social media. And I also think it's just as important to train the next generation to use social media and train them to use it safely and efficiently. The medical education system is very antiquated in the fact that they only teach medicine. But these days, doctors need to know so much more than just medicine. They need to know marketing. They need to know finance. And yes, they need to know social media. If you've been watching my channel for some time now, you know that I have strong feelings about the lack of personal finance, education and medical school, but social media is right there with it. The reason I think social media should be a part of the medical curriculum because it's so important for them to know how to use social media effectively without risking their careers that they worked so hard for. Social media is a great tool to express creativity, provide mentorship for the next generation of doctors, educate the public, market yourself or business, or even be used as a tool to inspire others to go into medicine. It is an excellent tool for medical professionals, but its impact should not be taken lightly. This is just one example of how a med student experienced the negative consequences of using social media, but it also should be taken as a learning experience for others. Before posting anything, you should always ask yourself, should I be posting this? Or could this be misinterpreted in a different way? Or even better, run it by somebody else before posting it. So that officially concludes this video. Please hit the subscribe button and like this video. Comment below if you have any questions or comments on this particular topic. As always, make sure you follow me on Instagram and TikTok if you don't already and I'll see you all on the next video. Bye.