Regular readers of HealthBlawg know that I would perhaps be the last to challenge the proposition that social media has a role to play in health care. However, I think Newt got it wrong here.

To me, this story does not represent a shining example of the Facebook cure, a "House"-like bit of detective work neatly yieldling the result we all knew could be pulled out of the proverbial hat. Instead, it represents yet another indictment of the colossal system failure that we call the U.S. health care system. There is a lot that we do right, but here the system got it wrong. In a more perfect world, where incentives are in place to encourage clinicians to spend more time with patients during office visits, perhaps this patient's ailments could have been diagnosed earlier, and the emergency hospitalization and coma -- with their attendant shocks to the pocketbook and body -- avoided.