Understanding Crohn's disease patients reaction to infliximab from facebook: A medical perspective

This paper completes an analysis started with two previous contributions, which have first identified Facebook as the most interesting social media for Crohn's disease patients and then Infliximab as the most discussed, both positively and negatively, treatment. In particular, in our second contribution, we concentrated on the satisfaction that emerged from online posts regarding Infliximab and compared it to the body of pertaining medical literature. We here finish off such work, comparing the satisfaction recorded by automatic means through the use of sentiment analysis techniques to the satisfaction recorded by expert physicians. In brief, two results appear to be of particular interest for the Crohn's disease community of patients: (a) physicians tend to classify as neutral many posts that were previously classified as negative, and, (b) posts of patients that have been treated with Infliximab for a long time are never classified as negative by medical examiners. In addition, this short paper sets forth, with strength, a problem of methodological nature: is it possible to effectively analyze the big data of patient online posts without a stronger cooperation between data analysts and medical experts?