How Doctors Do Things with Empathy in Online Medical Consultations in China: A Discourse-analytic Approach

ABSTRACT

It is widely acknowledged that doctors’ expressions of empathy are fundamental to a successful medical consultation. While extensive work has been done on empathic communication in face-to-face medical encounters, few studies explored expressions of empathy in online medical consultations. Such research is particularly scarce in Chinese contexts, even though China has recently seen substantial growth in e-healthcare activities. To gain a better understanding of clinical empathic communication in online environment, this study, using discourse-analytic tools, explores the pragmatic functions of doctors’ empathic responses in text-based online medical consultations in China. The study finds that most empathic responses by doctors can be said to perform the function of facilitating the institutional task of problem-solving, and a few serve the function of self-promotion that is likely to be triggered by the e-commerce model for online medical services.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Prof Teresa Thompson and the anonymous reviewers for handling this paper and for providing detailed and helpful suggestions. I would also like to thank Prof Rodney Jones for his valuable comments on my presentation on the same topic at a conference. I am also grateful to Dr Winnie Chor for her comments on an earlier version of this paper.

Notes

1. An “e-patient” is defined as a health consumer who participates in medical care online for him/herself or for his/her family members or loved ones (Masters, Ng’ambi, & Todd, 2010). This study likewise adopts the term “e-patient” because those who consult doctors via e-healthcare websites do so not only in their own behalf but also in behalf of their families or loved ones.

2. The “universal two-child” policy means that each family can have a limit of two children. Before this family planning policy, the Chinese government had imposed a limit of one child per family which was introduced in 1979.

3. The “Chunyu Doctor” platform is among the top five online health-care platforms, according to an investigation conducted by China Internet Weekly and a research institute of “eNet” in 2018. China Internet Weekly is a journal sponsored by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which is a national academy for natural sciences. “eNet” is one of the most influential Internet-based companies, founded in 1999 and specializing in IT and business services.

4. The original Chinese OMC texts are available from the author.