Exploring online patient-doctor interactions. An epistemic and pragmatic analysis of Q&A patterns in an Italian “Ask to the doctor” medical forum

The main objective of this research is to investigate the epistemic and pragmatic management of patient-doctor interactions in Italian online health communities. To achieve this goal, an advanced web scraping methodology was used to extract from an Italian Q&A service (within the healthcare platforms, Il Mio Dottore) 200 pairs of questions and answers concerning two pathological conditions: anxiety and hypothyroidism. We first tagged the two sub-corpora and analyzed them both quantitatively and qualitatively to establish (i) what types of questions were used by patients, and what epistemic attitude and pragmatic function they convey; (ii) whether doctors’ replies were aligned or not; (iii) whether there were differences between the two sub-corpora. The results revealed many similarities between the two sub-corpora, but also some differences, mainly concerning doctors’ response patterns, with a tendency towards misalignment more pronounced in the anxiety sub-corpus. The practical implications of this and similar research may be numerous. First, they can improve understanding of the epistemic and pragmatic dynamics at play in Q&A services. Secondly, such knowledge can be used to formulate practical recommendations to foster better alignment with patients, thereby improving their engagement. Finally, this knowledge can guide the development of chatbot design guidelines.