The Wisconsin State Journal Doug Moe column

Source: The Wisconsin State JournalOct.迷你倉最平 02--Last month, in a country without much Internet access, a group of medical clinicians, linked by Twitter, gathered to soak up history and take emergency medicine into the future.Among them was Mike Abernethy, who, in 21 years with UW Hospital's Med Flight, has seen plenty. He has likely made as many medical flights as any doctor, anywhere, but until last month, Abernethy, Med Flight's chief flight physician, had never seen Cuba.His participation in the Havana conference might not have happened if Abernethy hadn't opened an account with Twitter, the online social networking service, about a year ago."It's built for people in emergency medicine," Abernethy said, referencing the short bursts of communication that define Twitter. "We have the attention span of a bullet."Just this week, Abernethy said, he was tweeting back and forth with an online physician friend, Minh Le Cong, a member of Australia's Royal Flying Doctors Service, which delivers emergency and everyday care to the remotest regions of Australia.As they tweeted this week, Le Cong was sitting in an airport in Alice Springs. He wanted to show Abernethy, in Madison, a photo of a new medical device.It's the kind of thing that happens all the time now between emergency medical physicians who may never have met face to face, but who have been brought together by something called FOAM, or Free Open Access Meducation.FOAM came out of an emergency medicine conference in Dublin in 2012. A pub and more than one Guinness, appropriate given the acronym, are believed to have been involved. The concept embraces all manner of Internet communication, but Twitter, with its ability to quickly link blogs, texts, podcasts, photos and more, fuels it. The hashtag is #FOAMed.FOAM received an unofficial stamp of approval early on when Joe Lex, a Temple University emergency medical professor with more than four decades in the field, referenced it in remarks that have since been widely quoted.He said a textbook will tell you how medicine was practiced five years ago, a journal two years ago, and a good conference might tell you how medicine is practiced today. "If you want to know how we will practice medicine in the future," Lex said, "listen in the hallways and use FOAM."Abernethy, 55, was not a big social media guy prior to the past year. He has been on Facebook for four years, mostly to keep up with grade school friends from Steubenville, Ohio. Med Flight has a successful page, too. But Abernethy's year-old Twitter account went mostly unused until he learned from colleagues about FOAM."It has revolutionized the way I've educated myself," he said.I met Abernethy several ye儲存rs ago, and was taken with his passion and lack of pretense. He was proud of the work of his Med Flight colleagues. He had shoulder length hair he has since cut, and he had stories. He told of rescuing a man after a motorcycle crash near Arena. The man ended up in a cornfield and could barely speak, until Med Flight was loaded and they were taking off."My wife!" the man said. "Where's my wife?""What do you mean?" Abernethy said."She was on the motorcycle!"They found her, unconscious, in the cornfield. In the end, both husband and wife were OK.This week, Abernethy had Cuba stories. The educational conference, Sept. 16-20, was organized by DevelopingEM, an Australia-based not-for-profit, and aimed at senior emergency clinicians. Abernethy learned about it on Twitter, got in touch, and was invited to speak.Attendance by United States physicians was approved by the American government. Abernethy was excited to go. He'd studied Cuban history and read Ernest Hemingway, the novelist who lived outside Havana most of his last two decades. Abernethy was also eager to meet the physicians he knew only through Twitter. "In a sense we were good friends, except I didn't know what they looked like."He was detained briefly at the airport outside Havana, his passport examined, but the military-looking man asking questions finally said, "Doctor, thank you very much for coming to my country."There was an opening reception at Havana's historic Hotel Nacional. Abernethy was handed a mojito and a cigar, which he did not decline. A band played Cuban music.Over the next few days, both the conference and the country left their impressions. Abernethy looked favorably on Cuban health care, the number of doctors per capita, the emphasis on preventive medicine, and the friendliness of the people, how they gather along Havana's seawall at night to drink, sing and call to tourists.The city did have its rundown areas, and the government's controlling hand could be seen in the lack of cell phones, Internet service and satellite TV, except in the tourist hotels.Some of the taxis were American cars built before 1960, and the revolution. Abernethy waved one down, a 1948 Chevy, a model Abernethy once owned. The driver was amazed at how much he knew about the car."I would go back in a heartbeat," Abernethy said. Cuba had worked its magic, even if it was a hard country from which to tweet.Contact Doug Moe at 608-252-6446 or dmoe@madison.com. His column appears Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday.Copyright: ___ (c)2013 The Wisconsin State Journal (Madison, Wis.) 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