Social media itself is very helpful for
medical professionals; whether that's
patient outreach, education, marketing.
Despite people valuing these platforms
there's very little evidence to guide
our social networking practices, and so
that's what I kind of wanted to do for
plastic surgeons;
is to kind of give them an idea of not
only the perceptions of plastic surgery
using sentiment analysis, but also to kind
of help guide our practices on the network.
The main takeaway was that
social messages or tweets with the words
"Plastic Surgery" in them were more
negatively associated than the words
"reconstruction", "aesthetic", and "cosmetic".
For plastic, the reason why it was more
negative when it was compared to
cosmetic or aesthetic was the presence
of negative words being
fails, ugly, fake, never,
and then for reconstruction it was
a little bit of a different take it was
the absence of those negative words that
made reconstruction so much more
positive than plastic.
Those words kind of give you an idea
of maybe what the public generally associate 
with the words "Plastic Surgery"
meaning out of proportion, not natural, 
very easily noticeable
and does not look, you know,
something's a little askew.
The terms aesthetic and cosmetic; they didn't have
those negative words. So maybe there's
actually more balance to those images
that they associate with.
To do this study we
analyzed a large body of social media
messages and tweets using sentiment analysis,
to find out whether terms related to
plastic surgery, that being plastic
cosmetic, reconstruction, were either
positive or negative.
For us, for plastic surgeons,
reconstruction, aesthetic,
cosmetic; those are one thing to us.
To the public, this is evidence
that this didn't mean something different,
and perhaps this motivates some
Plastic Surgeons to go into social media
and participate and join the
conversation and educate the public.
