Empowering the physician-patient relationship: The effect of the Internet

Objectives: This review aims to explore the relationship between patient empowerment and the physician-patient relationship in the context of the clinical encounter. Difficulties and opportunities presented by patients’ use of the Internet are presented from the perspectives of both patients and health care providers. The review explores roles for librarians in facilitating communication and informed decision-making in the clinical consultation. Methods: Medline was searched using the MeSH terms Physician-Patient Relations, Internet /utilization, Power (Psychology) and Information Services. Scholars Portal was searched using the keywords Internet, Empowerment, and Consumer Health Information. Main Findings: Studies on how the Internet affects patients’ experience of empowerment within the clinical encounter have shown mixed outcomes. While patients’ desire to use the Internet for health information is increasing, some patients are reluctant to discuss this information in the clinical encounter for fear of challenging the physician’s authority. Some physicians express frustration in dealing with patients who search for information online, while others describe the Internet as beneficial. Conclusions: While searching the Internet is often personally empowering for patients, this sense of empowerment does not necessarily translate into self-efficacy in interactions with health care providers. Whether health information found on the Internet is empowering for patients in clinical consultations appears to depend on the power relations between patients and practitioners, how patients use the information they retrieve, as well as on physicians’ affective responses to these patients. Librarians have a role to play in educating health care consumers and mediating the exchange of information between practitioner and patient.