Comparing Health Forums: User Engagement, Salient Entities, Medical Detail
Abstract: Health discussion forums provide valuable information about diseases, symptoms, treatments and risk factors from a patient perspective, and allow exchanging experiences and mutual support. This paper analyzes and compares three different forums, Health Boards, Patient and Reddit, using three major conditions as representative samples: blood pressure, depression and diabetes. The analysis investigates three principal dimensions: the intensity of user engagement, the explicit coverage of salient entities such as frequent symptoms or risk factors, and the degree of medical detail expressed by specific drugs and their dosages. We report on commonalities across the three forums and on key findings about how they differ in their contents and interactions.
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