According to a TNS Sofres study published on April 10, one in two French people would regularly consult websites devoted to health to find additional information on diseases or simply to find out about treatments and symptoms.
Searches mainly relate to a disease or health problem (92%) and, in more than half of the cases, they relate to serious illnesses such as Cancer. They are also oriented towards treatment and medication (63%). In addition, two-thirds of patients with chronic diseases seek testimonials from people with the same disease as them. On the other hand, not very many of them follow doctors’ blogs.
Doctors are often sorry for these new practices because they see more and more patients arriving in their practice with the certainty of having a serious illness after reading articles on the Internet. But, for their part, Internet users believe that searching for information on the Internet allows them to take better charge of their health (61%) and makes the doctor-patient relationship more understandable (63%).
