Connecting With Your Dentist on Facebook: Patients' and Dentists' Attitudes Towards Social Media Usage in Dentistry.

BACKGROUND: Social media has begun to proliferate across medical areas and transformed how medical professionals serve and interact with their patients. It offers a new communication avenue that has the potential to engage patients and, hence, may be used to create value for both medical professionals and patients. In dentistry, even though patients and dentists frequently use social media in their personal lives, little is known about their attitudes and expectations toward using social media for professional interactions. OBJECTIVE: In this paper, we focus on the role of social media in dentistry. Specifically, we explore patients' and dentists' attitudes toward social media usage and their current online behaviors in this context. Furthermore, we examine potential challenges and opportunities regarding dentists' adoption of social media practices. METHODS: This research employed a large-scale online survey of 588 patients and 532 dental professionals. We assessed the attitudes, expectations, and social media behaviors from both patients' and dentists' perspectives. RESULTS: We found that more than 55% (290/532) of dentists in our sample have accounts for their dental practice on various social media platforms. Interestingly, while 73% (374/511) of patients did not expect their dental practice to have a social media presence, and 44% (207/468) thought that establishing a friendship with their dentists is not appropriate, the findings show that 36% (164/460) of patients had searched for their dentists, and 44% (207/470) of them were happy to establish contacts with dentists on social media. Furthermore, the findings highlight that patients were interested in exploring additional information such as online reviews and the qualifications of their dentists on Facebook pages. For dentists, more than half (375/432, 83%) of them in our sample thought that social media marketing is more efficient compared to traditional marketing. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings revealed some key challenges and opportunities to utilize social media in dentistry. For both patients and dentists, the role of social media in dental services remains vague, and both parties still share concerns about connecting with each other on social media platforms. However, there also exists a sizeable number of patients who are already comfortable to connect with their dentists on social media sites such as Facebook. The current findings show that there is an opportunity for dental practices to trade upon a more active social media presence for enhanced patient interaction and engagement.

Ring-shaped structure in free surface flow of non-Newtonian liquids.

We report the formation of a ringlike structure in the flow of particular non-Newtonian liquids coating a rotating vertical disk. Experiments were performed with a known volume of the liquid and at varying rotation rates such that the inertial effects were negligible. The liquid injected on the rotating disk initially coats the surface uniformly, which then redistributes itself such that at steady state a significant amount collected into a circular ring, off center with the axis of rotation. Beyond a critical rotation speed and for a given liquid volume, the ring formation did not occur. The ring formation was not observed in the case of Newtonian liquids. Rheological measurements along with the shear rate calculations suggest that the shear thinning nature of the liquids could be responsible for the observed ring formation.