With social media, patients can exchange information about their symptoms and compare with others’ health data, allowing them to create self-conceived health concepts that inform their relationship of self to their body.4-6 Some of these movements have generated enough lifestyle and health data to create a norm used to empower patients to take responsibility for their own health. Research has shown that health behaviors, such as vaccine hesitancy, can be tied to individuals’ interactions with the internet, Twitter, Facebook and other media.7
Social media certainly has benefits, allowing patients to come to appointments more prepared to think about their health, engage with data and information given to them by their healthcare team members, and feel ready to make important decisions. But as patients come to each encounter with more self-discovered information from sources potentially more trustworthy, the patient-clinician dynamic continues to evolve. The initial patient-clinician relationship was rooted in medical paternalism, in which physicians made decisions on behalf of their patients. Over time, it has evolved to more of a shared decision-making model.8
In the past, patients might bring in a page from Prevention magazine or a clip from the newspaper on a new treatment or medical discovery to review with their clinicians. Now patients access internet sources to inform their healthcare decision making and form opinions about their diagnoses or treatment options well before being seen by a healthcare team member.
As Kilbride et al. stated in a 2018 Journal of the American Medical Association article, “Today’s patients, informed by the internet and social media, are increasingly less dependent on their physicians for access to medical information and resources,” and this has a very real impact on their ultimate healthcare decisions and outcomes.8
Changes in the roles and experiences of being a patient and participation in the digital era are certainly connected with the overarching shifts in society beyond medicine shaping the current healthcare landscape, and the patient is in the middle of this now as more of a healthcare consumer than a patient.4,9
Although many of these trends can be empowering, patients will never have the educational background and training that clinicians do to allow them full autonomy in healthcare decision making. Healthcare team members guide patients to make decisions with the assistance of all the informational resources available.
So how can we, as clinicians, be more prepared to bridge this widening gap?
