Tag: tweetorial

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A couple of new Tweetorials

The first was in response to Robert Centor’s excellent description of how he uses reciprocal creatinine. Honestly I had not thought about reciprocal creatinine in a long time. It was fun diving into some of the literature around it. Here is the tweetorial:

Today I did a second tweetorial on hyperosmotic hyponatremia

Here I had some technical problems. I wrote the entire tweetorial using chained tweets in Safari on MacOS. When I went to upload all tweets, Twitter hung and failed to upload more than the first 8. I had to then go through and re-post the remainder of the tweetorial. I was frustrated and failed to attach two of the animated gifs I made. I added them as additional tweets but they break the flow. Tweetorials are like writing email newsletters, once you publish the tweets (or hit send on the newsletter) there is no opportunity for editing.

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My first Tweetorial: When salt tablets work in hyponatremia (and when they do not)

I hope you like my first tweetorial

I recently saw a patient with hyponatremia and cirrhosis. He had been started on salt tablets to try to correct the hyponatremia. In a limited number of diagnosis salt tablets can help hyponatremia. Cirrhosis is not one of them. I created this Tweetorial to teach some basic hyponatremia physiology and clear up when they may work and when they will not.

This is my first shot at a Tweetorial. I wrote out the tweets in Apple Notes. I think I will use a spreadsheet with a character counter next time. Too many of my Tweet-length thoughts ended up being a bit too wordy. Having a counter during creation would help.

I also should have more links and pics.

Additionally, I bought the domain Tweetorial.org. Any ideas what I should use it for?

 

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Rise of the Tweetorial

One of the interesting developments in MedTwitter has been the chained tweet to demonstrate a point. I think the master of this is Professor Darrel Francis.

This one is nicely relevant to this week’s NephJC:

Another famous innovator of the Medical Tweetorial is Vinay Prasad. Vinay smartly collects the first tweet to his Tweetorials in a pinned tweet.

https://twitter.com/vinayprasadmd/status/1007337958846783488?s=21

Another master of the Tweetorial is Tony Breu. He, similarly, collected his Tweetorials in one place.

This one has relevance to nephrology. Brilliant explanation.

Speaking of relevance to nephrology, Swapnil has thrown his hat in the Tweetorial ring

Paul Sufka has joined the party focusing with a focus on rheumatology:

Here is Bryan Vartebedian’s take on this development. His problems with the rise of the tweetorial can be summed as:

  • Poor indexing and search means these tweetorials will not be able to be found later.
  • Using 280 character tweets to convey 500-word ideas is a mismatch between the medium and message. These ideas would be better conveyed in a blog post rather than chopped up into beads of text to be strung together.
  • MedTwitter is a just a small sliver of the medical community and doing tweetorials traps the ideas in this small box.

In his conclusion, Vartabedian hedges a bit, but it is clear he believes in the blog:

I firmly believe that all of us should be poking at these applications to discover their most creative uses. But what any of us think is less relevant than what sticks with the public community of physicians. The market will bear this one out.

I love Sufka’s lessons on ANA. Prasay’s thread is a bold call to action that challenges the medical industrial publishing complex. It’s an important reminder that we are the publishers and no longer live in a permission-based system of launching ideas to the world.

We just need to remember that there’s a big medical world and a whole lot of eyeballs beyond our Twitter space. Let’s put our brilliance in the right place.

I’m on the other side of this argument. I think the Tweetorial is the most interesting development in MedTwitter since the journal club. Using polls, images, and chained tweets is an innovative use of the platform that allows the delivery of complex topics with ample evidence without resorting to links off the platform. It allows nuanced positions to be made while staying true to the medium. This is not just breaking up a 500 word essay to fit across an odd dozen tweets, but actually reformats the idea work within the confines and style of Twitter. It is the solution to the problem Twitter has had since it’s introduction, “How do you do big thoughts in only 140 characters.”