When Do Patients With Hand Illness Seek Online Health Consultations and What Do They Ask?

Abstract

Background Several websites allow people to post health questions and get answers from doctors. Knowing more about what patients seek from these websites might help inoffice educational efforts, but little is known about what occurs on these sites. Questions/purposes This study addressed whether patients seeking advice online already have seen a physician, the type of questions asked, if they are dissatisfied with their doctor, the characteristics of the physicians who respond, and the content of their answers. This study documents the circumstances and content of questions asked about hand illness, the characteristics of the physician responders, and their responses. Methods One hundred thirty-one hand surgery-related questions from an online health consultation website were reviewed retrospectively. The timing of and reason for the consultation, the content of the questions, the specialty of physician responder, and the content of the responses were recorded. Results Sixty patients (46%) were seeking information before seeing a doctor, 21 (16%) after a medical encounter, and 19 (15%) after hand surgery. With increasing contact with providers, patient queries transitioned from diagnosis, to treatment, to prognosis, and potential complications. Patients who had seen a doctor often expressed dissatisfaction (16 of 37 patients [43%]) as did those who had hand surgery (seven of 26 patients [27%]). Between one and eight doctors (average, two) answered each query. Most of the answering physicians were hand surgeons. The information they provided predominantly addressed diagnosis. Conclusions Online consultations are most common among patients who have not seen a doctor, but also reflect uncertainty and dissatisfaction after seeing a doctor. Although online health consultations might support patients' quest for information and understanding, and the potential for multiple answers from different doctors creates the possibility for increased balance and breadth of opinions, the quality of the information and cost-effectiveness of this approach are uncertain and need to be evaluated carefully in future studies.

Breast cancer information communicated on a public online platform: an analysis of ‘Yahoo! Answer Japan’

“…14,15 aside from social media, the online question-and-answer community is growing with time, but there are very few studies based on the contents of this community. 16 Content analysis of internet question-answer communities are important, as questions posted on these sites provide a rich source of direct reflections regarding health-related information demanded by the general population. Further research is needed to understand how the contents of question-and-answer communities inform and improve patient-centred care.…”

Is doctor-patient relationship influenced by health online information?

“…The Priestly Model of the doctor-patient relationship, as defined by Robert Veatch in 1972, which proposes complete submission of the patient to the physician, has been replaced by the Collegial Model, in which decision-making power is shared equally and there is no relation of superiority or inferiority.¹ Some foreign studies have shown that over 40% of patients seek information online before undergoing a procedure or before consulting a physician. 2,3 After consultation, many base their health decisions on information found online without discussing about this information with the healthcare professional. 4,5 In this sense, the doctor is often not aware of the whirlwind of doubts and expectations that the patient presents.…”

“…Often online health research among patients reflects the dissatisfaction and discontent that some patients have when they formally consult a medical professional. 2 It is possible that this dislike expressed by many patients stems from the current fragmentation of medicine in specialized areas, so that today the doctor tends not to look at the patient as a subject that expresses desires, wants and expectations, but as a part of the whole. In this way, the biopsychosocial aspect of the disease is forgotten.…”

“…In addition, the intellectual level of the patient is a factor that has an impact on the interpretation of the information collected, which makes the patient vulnerable to emotional expressions of anxiety about this information. 2 Given the broad access to health information, what should be the physician's attitude in face of this new reality of numerable technological subsidies? The Code of Medical Ethics of the Brazilian Federal Council of Medicine, in its Chapter XIII, "Medical Advertising", in Article 144, says that the physician should not prescribe, consult or diagnose through mass communication.…”

Impact of Scientific Versus Emotional Wording of Patient Questions on Doctor-Patient Communication in an Internet Forum: A Randomized Controlled Experiment with Medical Students

“…At the same time, knowledge in the field of health and medicine is very complex, often contradictory, highly sophisticated [ 7 , 8 ], and therefore often difficult to evaluate. One way in which laypeople deal with this situation is to consult medical experts in expert online forums [ 9 - 13 ]. Although their legal assessment is disputed, medical expert forums are increasingly used for purposes of counseling patients and other people who seek medical advice [ 13 - 18 ].…”