Collaboratively Producing the Patient-Consumer: How Patients Coach Each Other Toward Consumerist Dispositions Online

• In Event: 480 - Section on Medical Sociology Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 09. Health Expert Knowledge

Abstract

This paper examines how people with chronic illnesses train one another to hone social skills for medical encounters through online media. The study is premised on the idea that existing research on the impact of the Internet on patienthood has focused on informational resources at the cost of ignoring the behavioral and attitudinal resources that patients can acquire online. Drawing from a long-term study of a prominent online illness community, this paper identifies and describes three generic skill sets that patients use to advantage themselves in interactions with medical professionals: affect regulation, treatment persistence, and information management. I detail how members of the illness community coach each other to learn and deploy these skills. I refer to this phenomenon as lay health care coaching—a social process by which sufferers collaborate using Internet technology to render one another more effective patient-consumers. I argue that lay health care coaching advances existing theoretical conceptions of Internet-era patienthood by clarifying how empowered patient-consumers manage to acquire and exercise agency.

Author

• Drew Michael Foster, University of Michigan