Consumers and providers of Health Care Health, Medicine, Nursing Essay

Consumers and Providers of Healthcare
Student’s Name
Institutional Affiliation

Consumers and Providers of Healthcare
Changes in the healthcare sector arising from the advancement of the Internet are inevitable. In particular, the web provides unparalleled healthcare informational resources for both health providers and consumers. Since the majority of people can access the Internet today, including scholars, health professionals, and institutions, billions of posts and publications are made daily. For this reason, there exist massive health-related data on the web. However, the availability of health-related information on the Internet can have positive and negative effects on consumers and health professionals.
There are numerous positive effects of the health-related data availability on the web, which include cost-effectiveness and the provision of understandable information about signs, treatment procedures, and health outcomes. Specifically, anyone with a proper Internet connection can access multiple sources of health-related information on the web without much struggles (Mittelstadt, 2017). For example, if one searches “the causes of obesity,” millions of websites containing relevant information pops up. As such, individuals are required to choose the appropriate sources to read and acquire the information that they want. The Internet presents the data in multiple languages, and there is no excuse for a language barrier since a person reads sources that he or she can comprehend easily. The other positive effect of data availability on the Internet is that people can proactively identify a specific health issue and treat it before it progresses to advanced stages. In other words, the web enables individuals to make excellent health-related decisions, which promote healthy lifestyles.
Individuals with chronic diseases, such as multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis, benefit from support groups available on the Internet. Some of the health conditions where affected people do not portray physical symptoms; it becomes difficult for friends and families to offer proper support. In that case, such individuals can join communities of people on the Internet with similar health problems, which make them comfortable since they can interact with individuals who unde...