Responses to unsolicited patient e-mail requests for medical advice on the World Wide Web.

Abstract

THERE HAS BEEN explosive growth in recent years of the Internet and World Wide Web as tools for seeking and communicating health and medical information,¹ with increasing numbers of physicians and health care institutions maintaining Web sites. Physicians or medical information providers who run such sites and post e-mail addresses likely will receive unsolicited e-mail from unknown patients asking for medical information and/or advice. On our bilingual Web site in Germany, patients frequently cross geographic borders to seek such information (about 75% of the unsolicited patient e-mail messages we receive comes from abroad, mostly from the United States²). As our experience likely is not unique, this situation raises the following 2 key questions: How do such sites react to this unsolicited e-mail? And, should they respond at all?