Blog Assignment #8

Certainly, the Internet, social media and mobile phones made health information more accessible to the public. The biggest shift the Internet has brought to our society is E-patients. They are creating a new healthcare environment. What's on the Internet is not always true, that's why this shift is not leading towards a good path when people auto medicate themselves.

In my family, we are not really E-patients. If we feel sick we just simply try to rest and take pills. If that doesn't work we would call or visit our doctor. Going to a medical consultation in Panama is not expensive.

My grandfather from my mom's side is the only grandparent who's still alive. He's 90 and he is in perfect conditions. He is obviously not a fan of technology and he doesn't even have a clue on how to use the Internet.

My sister is a doctor. So, every time we have a medical concern, we just ask here what we might have. We rely more on our doctor's opinion because we know we can't trust everything that's online.

According to the Journal of Medical Internet Research:

"The quality of information on the Internet is paramount: accurate relevant information is beneficial, while inaccurate information is harmful. Physicians appear to acquiesce to clinically-inappropriate requests generated by information from the Internet, either for fear of damaging the physician-patient relationship or because of the negative effect on time efficiency of not doing so. A minority of physicians feels challenged by patients bringing health information to the visit; reasons for this require further research.

Views About Patient Responses to the Internet

Eighty-five percent of all respondents had experienced an occasion when a patient brought information from the Internet to a visit. For most physicians this is still a relatively-rare event; 59% of respondents stated that less than one fifth of their patients had done this. 87% of physicians perceived their patients as being concerned about the quality of information on the Internet, and 84% of respondents rated their patients as only fair or poor (rather than good, very good, or excellent) at appraising the quality of information on a Web site ."

Here's a link to a video that talks about e-Patients.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7ZrWSmQxcU