“You become a slightly better doctor”: Doctors adopting integrated medical expertise through interactions with E-patients

Leeor Shachar

Social Science & Medicine, 2022, vol. 305, issue C

Abstract: The accessibility of information via the internet has radically altered the doctor–patient relationship. By means of in-depth interviews with Israeli physicians from four different specialties, this study explored how physicians cope with internet-informed patients, referred to as e-patients, and examined how they make sense of their new professional roles. Findings show that three types of boundaries in the doctor–patient relationship have been blurred by the emergence of the e-patient: the boundaries between doctors' and patients' knowledge, between doctors' authority and patients' autonomy, and between positivistic knowledge and humanistic knowledge. Each of these is a boundary between liberal and non-liberal values. Only the combination of all these components produces, according to the participants, a good doctor. I call this new phenomenon integrated medical expertise and explain how it diverges from previous notions of ‘good doctoring’.

Date: 2022
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DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2022.115038

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