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Letter to Editor Plastic and Aesthetic Research

Medicine and new social media: the good

and the bad of taking a “selfie” for skin

problems

Anna Zampetti , Dennis Linder 2
1
1 Rare diseases and Periodic Fevers Research Centre, Catholic University of Rome, 00168 Rome, Italy.
2 Section of Biostatistics, University of Oslo, NO-0316 Oslo, Norway.
Correspondence Author: Dr. Anna Zampetti, Rare diseases and Periodic Fevers Research Centre, Catholic University of Rome, Largo F.
Vito 1, 00168 Rome, Italy. E-mail: anna.zampetti@gmail.com

Sir, Patients may for instance also use selfies to have their
moles checked. The device used to take the pictures,
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, selfie is a their brightness, contrast and sharpness can impact
photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically by heavily on the quality of images. We can miss important
means of a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to additional information such as time of appearance,
a social media and shared with other people. The use modifications over time etc. Furthermore, dermoscopy
of selfies has been dramatically increasing among the may be required, hence we can rarely provide a sound
general population in the course of the last decade. “safe” diagnosis.
Admittedly, most of us are used to take selfies in any
kind of situation, for example to show others how we On the other hand, encouraging patients to take a selfie
spent our spared time or simply how we enjoy meals, to monitor existing moles or ascertain the appearance
or to show off ourselves in dangerous or breathtaking of new ones is likely to increase awareness about the
panoramas. We love posting our pictures on the social need of a regular mole check and the risk of melanoma.
networks to share them with family and friends.
It may provide an important benefit for subjects who are
living in rural communities with limited access to medical
The habit of taking selfies is so widespread to become facilities. We can recall the personal experience of seeing
[1]
even one of the means of communication between
patients and doctors for example by mobile social media a patient in an outpatient skin cancer department of a
like WhatsApp. It is a raising issue for many medical county hospital who declared himself enthusiastic to have
specialties and overall for dermatology because of the been asked to take “selfies of his moles”, saying that for
fact that the skin is the largest, the most visible and the once he was happy to take a “useful selfie” after taking so
most accessible organ. many pointless so far. Furthermore, selfies may represent
the only way of documenting short-lived lesions, such as
It is becoming more and more common that doctors hives and can in certain cases be extremely helpful to put
are asked an opinion by patients who have sent some together a significant medical history.
pictures showing unusual skin rashes, moles of dubious
nature or unidentifiable lesions. All too often, making Dermatologists and plastic surgeons could potentially
a correct and well-pondered diagnosis is an impossible encourage patients to take selfies for post interventional
achievement. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative
Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License, which allows
Access this article online others to remix, tweak and build upon the work non-commercially, as long as the
author is credited and the new creations are licensed under the identical terms.
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How to cite this article: Zampetti A, Linder D. Medicine and
new social media: the good and the bad of taking a “selfie” for skin
DOI: problem. Plast Aesthet Res 2016;3:282-3.
10.20517/2347-9264.2016.26
Received: 14-04-2016; Accepted: 06-06-2016
282 © 2016 Plastic and Aesthetic Research | Published by OAE Publishing Inc.