Recently, #MedTwitter was awash with pictures of medical professionals in bikinis as a unique and effective protest to a flawed, and now retracted, journal article.
Those posting objected to the methods used and implicit bias contained in a recently published article in the Journal of Vascular Surgery. The authors replicated the methods and conclusions of a prior 2014 study, which did not garner the same attention at the time.
In both studies, various authors from different branches of surgery created fake accounts on social media and then used Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) lists of residents to scrutinize their public profiles for evidence of “unprofessional” conduct. Each of these studies was presented at a national meeting.
But having men create fake accounts to then secretly monitor residents’ social media profiles for what they personally find objectionable is not scientifically rigorous, and itself represents unprofessional behavior.