Uncontrolled Disinformation About Regional Anesthesia From Social Media, and the Effect on the Pregnant Patients Decisions.

Social media has become a place to receive and share information today, especially for women of childbearing age. according to a study published in 2019, 78% of social media users are women and 80% of them are in the 18-40 age range. Again, studies have shown that women often use a large number of alternative platforms to receive or share information about pregnancy and parenting.

It has been shown that there are 3 different reasons why patients follow medical content on social media. Behaviorally, patients can be self-healing with the information they receive; cognitively, the search for information about their own condition and the desire to understand their condition is the desire to be able to share common feelings with other people who are in the same situation emotionally.

Anxiety develops in the preoperative period in 21-25% of cesarean section patients. This anxiety response can cause premature and low birth weight baby birth by vasoconstricting the uterine artery through the autonomic central nervous system.

It is common for pregnant women who already have concerns before the cesarean section that will take place to look for information about both the surgery and the anesthesia method that will be applied. Studies including patients who were watched preoperative anesthesia videos about the anesthesia technique, has showed low anxiety levels. However, this videos were custom made videos by the organizations such as hospitals, universities.

Nowadays, hundreds of information about regional anesthesia are accessed from any internet search engine when a question is written about the methods of anesthesia that can be applied during C/S. This information may have positive or negative effects on the patient, as well as include uncontrolled, unsupervised comments, articles and images. Our aim is primarily to evaluate whether our patients are exchanging information via social media or the internet and the effects of these shares on their concerns