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A growing number of patients search for medical information on the Internet. Understanding how they use the Internet is important, as this might impact their health, patient-practitioner roles, and general health care provision. In this article, we illustrate the motives of online health information seeking in the context of the doctor-patient relationship in Switzerland. We conducted semistructured interviews with patients who searched for health information online before or after a medical consultation. Findings suggest that patients searched for health information online to achieve the goals of preparing for the consultation, complementing it, validating it, and/or challenging its outcome. The initial motivations for online health information seeking are identified in the needs for acknowledgment, reduction of uncertainty, and perspective. Searching health information online was also encouraged by personal and contextual factors, that is, a person's sense of self-responsibility and the opportunity to use the Internet. Based on these results, we argue that online health information seeking is less concerned with what happens during the consultation than with what happens before or after it, in the sociocultural context.

Background and aim Public health measures used to mitigate the COVID-19 epidemic may have unintended, detrimental consequences particularly on older adults, whose voices and perspectives are often silent or silenced. The aim of this study was to explore the lived experiences of individuals aged 64 or older during the first COVID-19 lockdown. Methods We conducted a qualitative study in a convenience sample of 19 older adults (aged 64+) living at home in the Italian-speaking region of Switzerland during the first COVID-19 lockdown, between April and May 2020. Participants varied in terms of gender, education, age, nationality, and socio-economic status. We conducted semi-structured phone interviews to elicit emotions, expectations and hopes in relation to the present situation, and the post-pandemic world. We inquired about opinions on the enforced public health measures, including those specifically targeting older adults, and on the societal portrayal of older adults. Findings We found that the epidemic and the public health response to it had both generated a variety of resentments and a high degree of ambivalence at the individual, micro-, meso- and macro-social levels. We also found that labelling older adults as an at-risk sub-population inevitably contributed to public and self-stigmatization. Discussion We conducted an in-depth qualitative investigation of lived experiences of older adults during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in one of the most gravely hit region in Europe. Our findings on the complexity of unintended, detrimental consequences of outbreak responses on older adults have relevant implications for local adaptions of public health measures, and suggest that public health authorities should engage vulnerable sub-populations and promote bi-directional communication to inform and support communities.

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This article describes the strategies used by physicians to interact with Internet-informed patients, alongside illustrating the motives underlying such strategies. Semistructured interviews were conducted with a sample of 17 physicians from primary care and medical specialist practices in the Italian part of Switzerland. The sample was diversified in terms of specialty, age, and gender. Data collection and analysis were driven by grounded theory and supported by a computer-assisted qualitative analysis program. A typology of four communicative strategies has been outlined. The adoption of these strategies is shaped by physicians' general attitude toward Internet-informed patients, based on their conception of medical information for lay people through the Internet. However, this general attitude is mediated by doctors' interpretation of the specific communicative context, that is, their appraisal of three aspects: the patient's health literacy, the relevance of the online information to be discussed, and their own communicative efficacy. At the end, the process of interpretation underlying the strategies is discussed to expand on it and to identify implications for practice and research.