Case Reports in the Age of Twitter

As doctors, we share the stories of our patients. Medical students trade stories as soon as they learn the language of medicine. Whether casual anecdotes shared among colleagues, formal case reports published in journals, or novelistic retelling in memoir form, this sharing has a long and rich history. In the last decade, case reports have found a new home on social media, most notably Twitter. Sharing cases on this public and interactive platform raises issues that were inconsequential in the past and we suggest that the harms of sharing cases in this way are many and the benefits few.