Choice of words in doctor-patient communication: an analysis of health-related internet sites.

As more and more doctor-patient communication is happening online, it is important to know how doctors adapt to their patients' knowledge level and ensure that they make themselves understood in this medium. This article examined question-answer sets from health archives to see whether medical experts adapted their answers to the way laypersons verbalized their concerns. The authors analyzed word use and further stylistic variables in question-answer pairs to test 2 hypotheses: (a) the lexical entrainment hypothesis predicting that experts would entrain to patients' word use; and (b) the linguistic copresence hypothesis predicting that the more medical terminology used by the patient, the more demanding experts' answers would be. Results provided evidence that the patients' choice of words impacts the experts' answers. Practical implications are discussed for improving mutual understanding in online health advice.