Sure Cure: Brazil First to Get ‘Instagram for Doctors’ in Own Language

A medical photo-sharing app, which allows doctors to share photographs and information about their patients to improve their knowledge and aid diagnoses, will be launched in Brazil next Monday.

Launched worldwide in May 2013, the application for healthcare professionals Figure 1 looks like Instagram with photos, mostly appropriate only for people with strong nerves. It enables users to take images of various illnesses, surgeries and suchlike, then upload them for feedback from the community of healthcare users accessing the app.

A 40-year-old male presented with a painful mass on his left shoulder. He had previously undergone several courses of chemotherapy and radiation therapy for stage IV Hodgkin lymphoma that had relapsed twice. View this case to find out the cause of the mass and how it was treated.

Фото опубликовано Figure 1 (@figure1) Апр 28 2016 в 3:00 PDT

As many as 10% of Brazilian medical students along with a large number of professional doctors and nurses are regularly users of the English version of Figure 1,  and the Brazilian version will be officially launched for Brazil on Monday, Veja news magazine said. Brazilian Portuguese will become the first foreign language to be used in the application, in addition to Spanish.

Figure 1 has become a very popular service among physicians. The figures speak for themselves:

• 1 million medical professionals from 190 countries use the social network;

• at least 10,000 people simultaneously online;

• 65% of students at US medical schools use the network;

• Brazilians take the sixth place among the countries with the highest number of users;

• images shared on the network have been viewed more than 1.5 billion times;

• 63,000 posts on Zika have been published through the app during the outbreak out of virus epidemic;

• a number of highly respected hospitals and institutions like Doctors without Borders have joined the platform.

The main advantage of Figure 1 is clear — it allows doctors to share information and their own experience quickly, and to conduct medical diagnosis and treatment more efficiently and effectively. However, a response on the app is not certain to be accurate, and some professionals consider posting personal patients' photos through Figure 1 totally unacceptable as it violates the right to privacy.