The Challenge of Wired Patients and .com Health:

The Impact of the Internet on Doctors’ Professional Status and Autonomy

The aim of my MA thesis is to study how the availability of health information available through the Internet is affecting the medical profession, specifically its status and autonomy in Finland. My proposition is that changes in the perception of medical profession are the result of many factors; the availability of medical information via the Internet is one of these factors, and is challenging a core element of the medical profession: monopoly over medical knowledge. The study will use the concept of profession defined by Howard Becker (1962) as the theoretical framework. Rather than evaluating the changes from ‘outside’, the patients’ point of view, the study will observe the changes in the social position from ‘inside’, as the doctors themselves perceive it.

The data will be collected through a series of semi-structured in-depth interviews with doctors from various fields in the private and public sectors. My hypothesis is that the ease of access to understandable medical knowledge through online sources of health information is challenging the knowledge which characterises the profession. At the same time, this ease of access to knowledge produces increasingly aware and informed patients, who are transforming the tasks which define the medical profession. These types of changes in the perception of the status of the medical profession may mirror wider societal changes brought on by easily obtainable knowledge and information through an accessible medium such as the Internet.