Twitter has been known to hold many world records for doing things first. Mostly it has been related to events and happenings news being broken through tweeting. But this time it is something very unique and positive. According to Mashable, the doctors at Houston’s Memorial Hermann Northwest Hospital managed to create a medical and social media history when they live-tweeted an entire open-heart surgery for the first time ever.
This might come as a surprise as during such an important operation surgeons must be concentrating of this complex human machine, the human heart, to get it back to work properly and safely. But the surgeons did manage to create a virtual instruction class for other medical students to follow how it is all done. There was no risk to the patient whatsoever and he made it through healthily. This Twitter about open-heart comes in February, the month which is celebrated in America as the month of heart and it is sponsored by the American Heart Association.
The basic idea behind this all was to raise awareness of cardiovascular health and disease prevention. The updates were about the type of surgery and what the surgeon was doing and why. What are the duties and responsibilities of each member of the surgery team. The surgeon, Dr. Michael Macris successfully performed a double-coronary artery bypass on a 57-year-old man. His colleague, Dr. Paresh Patel, was the one who was tweeting updates and answered questions which the followers had to ask.
Dr. Macris was the one who carried the camera attached to his head and Dr. Patel took photos at various points in the operation according to Texas Monthly. The entire tweets, photos and video of the two-hour surgery have been put together in a Storify post created by the hospital. The Twitter account through which this first-time-ever record was made is @houstonhospital and it has around 5,100 Twitter followers. According to Dr. Patel’s tweet, it was “an educational look into a common double bypass #surgery.”
To check the tweets, go to Storify here.
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