Introduction:

higher education involves students influenced by digital social networks whose power to share, create and communicate becomes an essential element in their lives, so it demands from teachers to incorporate new ways of teaching.

Objective:

to describe the possibility of using social networks in teaching and health care.

Methods:

a review of bibliographic sources in SciELO, Google Academic and Infomed was carried out from 2015 to 2019, based on the key words: digital social networks, learning, students, web tools. Twenty-four documents were chosen for their relevance to the study.

Results:

through the review it was found that social networks have been a revolution on the Internet, so it has been adopted by some health professionals as a means to manage knowledge, disseminate information and strengthen care and teaching. The subtopics reviewed are related to some theoretical precisions about them, their use in medical education and the link established by patients with the same interests or diseases; and opinions about the scientific reliability of its information related to health, are shared.

Conclusions:

social networks can be used in medical teaching and care, always with the guidance of health professionals who guarantee the scientific reliability of the information to be shared.

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