Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Jun 27, 2019
Open Peer Review Period: Jun 27, 2019 - Aug 22, 2019
Date Accepted: Oct 14, 2019
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Prevalence and Outcomes of Online Seeking for Acute Symptoms: a cross-sectional study
ABSTRACT
Background:
Most of the literature indicated that online health information seeking is mostly used for well-established diseases. However, only a few studies reported health information seeking in the absence of a doctor visit and in the context of acute symptoms.
Objective:
The aim of this survey is to estimate the prevalence of online health information seekers for acute symptoms and the impact of such information on symptom management and health services utilization.
Methods:
This is a cross-sectional study of a convenience sample of 287 Lebanese adults (response rate 18.5%) between December 2016 and June 2017. A survey was answered by participants online or through phone-based interviews.
Results:
Around 64% of the participants checked the internet for health information when they had acute symptom(s). The rate of those who sought online health information first when experiencing acute symptom(s) in the past 12 months was 19.2%. Of those, 50% visited the doctor because of the obtained information, and the rest self-medicated or sought pharmacist advice; the majority (77.7%) improved within 3-4 days.
Conclusions:
Higher education level and trust in the online medical information were two major predictors of online health information seeking for acute symptoms. Seeking online health information first for acute symptoms is not uncommon and it may lead to self-management avoiding physicians’ visit. Physicians should encourage their patients to discuss online health information and should guide them toward trusted online websites.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.