Twitter Helps Unearth Our Health Misconceptions

To get a feel for what society's health is like, you would probably talk to a doctor or log on to the health department's website. Or, you could just check Twitter.

Two computer scientists at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore examined 1.5 million tweets related to health between May 2009 and October 2010, and found that the popular microblogging website portrayed the ills that plague us and the treatments sought as a result, BBC News reported.

The analysis also showed that a lot of people are misguided about the right treatments for their ailments.

For example, "we found that some people tweeted that they were taking antibiotics for the flu," Ph.D. student Michael J. Paul, one of the researchers for the project, told BBC News. "But antibiotics don't work on the flu, which is a virus, and this practice could contribute to the growing antibiotic resistance problems."

Paul and his colleague Mark Dredze formulated a system that filtered out irrelevant Tweets, and found that the most commonly Tweeted ills included allergies, depression, cancer, obesity, insomnia and pain, Fox News reported.

And for 200,000 of those Tweets, the researchers were able to deduce geographic information for the user to see how flu and allergy seasons peaked across the United States, the Daily Mail reported.

However, the researchers warned that only very shallow, base-level information about health could probably be garnered from Twitter.

"We could only learn what people were willing to share," Paul told the Daily Mail. "We think there's a limit to what people are willing to share on Twitter."

A few random examples we pulled together:

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Chris Tung

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Chris Tung

GOOD NEWS: Doctor said my cholesterol levels are okay now. If I keep doing what I\'m doing, I\'ll be good. :D #livin

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Comments

[Chuck Bluestein]

11:05 PM on 07/08/2011

America is a very unhealthy country but it is a rich country. Being thin and healthy is not good for the economy. Being sick and obese is good for the economy. So food companies add things to the food like HFCS (high fructose corn syrup) that make people eat more, get fatter and cause health problems. Also type 2 diabetes goes along with obesity.

Twitter has a lot of links to information and articles to be healthier. Also you can see on Twitter that a huge amount of people are vegans, on a raw vegan diet or do yoga. I just put a link on Twitter about Dr Joel Fuhrman's program that is trying to get rid of obesity and food related health problems. http://bit.ly/nYnbQN So Twitter is good for spreading the news about breakthroughs like the Huffington Post article about how cherries are better for pain than aspirin.

[novabird]

01:50 AM on 07/12/2011

"HFCS (high fructose corn syrup) that make people eat more, get fatter and cause health problems" yes, and also MSG based flavor enhancers which do the same as well as cause brain toxicity and most MSG based products are "hidden" in processed foods under benign sounding names like "natural flavoring".

Why do mutli national food companies want to fatten us up? Duh. I just answered my own question.

[Travis Ross]

06:00 PM on 07/08/2011

This is an excellent use of Twitter, but I don't think the company warrants a valuation of $8 billion like I was reading this morning. It seems like the type of company that would make a great addition to the portfolio of a larger company but will never be able to compete with the likes of Google+ or Facebook on its own. It's like having a Hummer truck; it's neat, but not very practical. My own experience with Twitter is limited, as I just opened an account a few weeks ago to promote my humor blog. I write about my Twitter experience here: http://simplemanssurvivalguide.blogspot.com/2011/07/epic-twitter-fail.html

[Chuck Bluestein]

09:52 PM on 07/08/2011

Twitter is in a class by itself. President Obama just had the first Twitter town hall meeting. Obama depended heavily on Twitter to help get him elected. Google has Google. But Google Adsense (ads on Google) is on Twitter. Many businesses use Twitter to let their customers know the latest. If you want to advertise on Facebook, then you can pay them. You can follow up to 1,000 people on Twitter a day. Try sending 15 friend requests on Facebook in a day and they suspend your account for a while.