Table 3.
Topics of online health information sought by participant and source type. Multiple responses were allowed for each source.
| Source type (number) | Health conditions or symptoms, n (%) | Medication, n (%) | Medical procedure or treatment, n (%) | Diet, n (%) | Fitness, n (%) | Self-diagnosis, n (%) |
| Overall, by participanta (297) |
268 (90.2) | 179 (60.3) | 137 (46.1) | 132 (44.4) | 119 (40.1) | 69 (23.2) |
| Search engines (291) |
248 (85.2) | 148 (50.9) | 102 (35.1) | 105 (36.1) | 91 (31.3) | 58 (19.9) |
| Health-related websites (203) |
164 (80.8) | 83 (40.9) | 57 (28.1) | 27 (13.3) | 19 (9.4) | 18 (8.9) |
| Social media (119) |
68 (57.1) | 47 (39.5) | 27 (22.7) | 44 (37) | 45 (37.8) | 13 (10.9) |
| Health community forums (84) |
63 (75) | 29 (34.5) | 27 (32.1) | 18 (21.4) | 16 (19) | 11 (13.1) |
| LLMb-based chatbots (63) |
34 (54) | 17 (27) | 18 (28.6) | 21 (33.3) | 21 (33.3) | 13 (20.6) |
| Health applications (54) |
26 (48.1) | 14 (25.9) | 5 (9.3) | 10 (18.5) | 20 (37) | 6 (11.1) |
| Conversational assistants (24) |
10 (41.7) | 12 (50) | 4 (16.7) | 7 (29.2) | 7 (29.2) | 2 (8.3) |
aTotal number of unique topics searched online across all sources.
bLLM: large language model.