Brain surgery and Twitter

I’m not too sure if those two words should appear in a sentence together. However, a hospital over in Houston has recently started to give live twitter updates for operations such as brain and open heart surgery.  Not only do they keep you up to date with tweets, but the social team is also using Pinterest and YouTube to enable them to share a long stream of images and videos of the operations.

The hospitals team of social networkers tweet all this from outside the operating theatre alongside a specialist who is there to answer any questions the followers may have.

My question is, does social media really have a place within this type of scenario? I think there are definitely some situations which should not be shared – brain surgery is one of them.