Really? OK...Why Not! We're being studied folks. Trying to put us in a slot. Obviously this is just one take on the character of health chatroom visitors and users, and another study might see things differently. OK, so WHO on here participated in this survey, as I don't see a category for the clinically insane. Maybe I'm in a category all my own, but somehow I don't think so.
Excerpts:
“We expected to find that women in these online rooms would discuss surgical options, including risks and benefits,” said Marmor, an informatics fellow and surgery resident at UC San Diego School of Medicine. “Surprisingly, we found that 95 percent of posters had already undergone surgery. Few who were posting in chat rooms had not already had an operation.”
“We identified four broad categories of visitors to online health communities from an online survey of more than 180 online health community users,” said Huh. “These users included ‘caretakers, opportunists, scientists and adventurers’.”
https://health.ucsd.edu/news/features/P ... s.aspx#top
BS