Dr. Kelley
Maybe I should have placed a better follow up question at the end of my post, something along the lines of:

“With a lot of clinicians using social media to promote physical therapy and their treatment philosophies/styles as well as informing people of different diagnoses, interventions, manual techniques, etc. How do you filter out those who you do not deem to be reputable and therefore find better clinicians that you would follow and possibly utilize their information?”

With that being said, I think this post does indeed have a large learning moment. When searching the literature, we have to weed out poor quality articles. In the same light, as we search for fellow clinicians who are on social media, we should weed out those who are spreading poor quality information. I believe this also shows that, like you said, there is a lot of garbage out there and we need to be vigilant in promoting quality patient management and quality physical therapy while questioning and avoiding the promotion of said garbage.

Finally, here is an article from the archives of internal Medicine called “Words That Harm, Words That Heal. The article discusses how the words that we use affect our patients. A quote that I found to be intriguing was the following:

“Being ill inherently humbles and corrodes the sense of self, making patients vulnerable to the words of their physicians. Language reinforces the tendency of the patient to yield to the authority of the physician, and it is one way that physicians inadvertently distance themselves from patients. Rather than describe the complexity of a situation, physicians may use words that generate fear, anxiety, despair, or
hopelessness, thus silencing all further discussions. As a result, patients have more difficulty making intelligent decisions and becoming active participants in their care. Such intense emotions also dissipate hope and aggravate symptoms, and may adversely affect healing.”

The article talks about frightening metaphors, misunderstood jargon and technical language, reasons why physicians use words that may harm, and also language that heals. The article proposes four possible reasons why physicians may use words to harm and they are:
1) Medicine’s inherent uncertainty may prompt the use of words that harm.
2) Time pressure may also encourage physicians to curtail patients’ questions through use of words that harm.
3) Sometimes a caring physician may reach for alarmist language in order to convey a sense of urgency, thus hoping to ensure that his or her patient will comply with lifesaving recommendations.
4) It is also likely that physicians are so close to the language of medicine, to the specific words of their subspecialty, that they may no longer really hear the words that they use.

The author describes words of healing as “clear, precise meaning and with connotations that do not evoke dread in the patient…Healing language avoids words that intensify these emotions or destroy hope and any prospect for rational self-determination…language that adapts and responds to a patient’s experience.” Reading this definition of words of healing is a nice way to create a framework and allow us to create our own words of healing for our patients.

With that being said, I am going to leave one last quote found in this article about words that heal:

The essential feature of language that heals is empathic communication, eloquently described by Coulehan et al as language that aides the process of healing by bolstering patient’s strengths, validating their perspective, and teaching them how to grow to be more self-reliant.