Communicating the Experience of Illness through Patient Blogs

Currently 13% of e-patients write a blog about their diagnosis and treatment, where e-patients refers to the 61% of US adults who use the web for health information. The number of patient bloggers is likely to grow with the popularity of blogs and other forms of social media and the increased use of blogs on public health, hospital, and media websites. Patient blogs range from New York Times journalist Dana Jennings blogging about his prostate cancer with hundreds of thousands of readers and hundreds of comments to a woman writing about her breast cancer with a small number of readers and few, if any, comments. In a qualitative preliminary survey, we found that individuals diagnosed with chronic illness who started and maintained a blog did so primarily to help others with the same diagnosis, communicate with family and friends, express feelings, and track the progression of the disease and treatment. Most never showed their doctor. All felt very committed to the process. These results led to a further study currently under way to investigate the benefits of health blogs for patients, their family, friends, other patients, and healthcare providers through surveys and interviews. Another goal is to understand if there are patients who would not otherwise consider it yet could benefit from a recommendation from their healthcare provider to start a blog. Finally we are analyzing patient blogs to determine what public health and healthcare professionals can learn from perusing these narratives of the experience of illness.