Medicine and the media: the ethics of virtual medical encounters

The expansion of new forms of public media, including social media, exposes clinicians to more illness experiences/narratives than ever before and increases the range of ways to interact with the people depicted. Existing professional regulations and ethics codes offer very limited guidance for such situations. We discuss the ethics of responding to such scenarios through presenting three cases of clinicians encountering television or social media stories involving potential unmet healthcare needs. We offer a structured framework for health workers to think through their responses to such situations, based around four key questions for the clinician to deliberate upon: who is vulnerable to harm; what can be done; who is best placed to do it; and what could go wrong? We illustrate the application of this framework to our three cases.