In the last years a shift in the practice of medical communication has occurred and it leads to a displacement from a paternalistic model of patient-provider information toward a model implying an embeddedness of the medical and human values in the medical interaction and in the decision-taking process of the informed patient. Researches show that older adults respond differently to online communication than younger adults. In this context, seniors face new challenges as regards health-related information and medical communication. The present study deals comparatively with the health-related internet use by the seniors in two European countries: Romania and Germany. Using a qualitative methodology, which involved the in-depth semi-structured interviewing of twenty persons aged 65 years or over who used the internet including for health-related search, we tried to find out which are the similarities and differences between the two samples as concerns health-related online informing and medical communication. Our research has revealed a number of interesting results and inferences. Thus, while between the two samples there are similarities as regards using the internet as a starting point for general information related to health and making informed medical decisions, there exist also a series of differences as regards various aspects, such as the health-related internet use itself – the interest and the ways of searching, the accessed content and websites, the trust in the reliability of the online information, the online feedback and activism etc., as well as the openness to discuss with the physicians about the information gained by the internet consumption.

中文翻译：

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罗马尼亚和德国老年人寻求在线健康相关信息：探索性比较研究

在过去的几年中，医学交流实践发生了转变，并导致其从患者提供者信息的家长式模型转向暗示医学和人类价值观在医学互动和决策中嵌入的模型。知情患者的服用过程。研究表明，老年人对在线交流的反应与年轻人不同。在这种情况下，老年人在与健康有关的信息和医疗交流方面面临新的挑战。本研究比较涉及两个欧洲国家（罗马尼亚和德国）老年人与健康相关的互联网使用。使用定性方法 该研究涉及对使用互联网进行包括健康相关搜索在内的20岁65岁以上人群的深入半结构化访谈，我们试图找出这两个样本之间在与健康相关的在线方面的异同通知和医疗交流。我们的研究揭示了许多有趣的结果和推论。因此，尽管两个样本之间在使用互联网作为与健康相关的一般信息和做出明智的医疗决定的起点方面存在相似之处，但在各个方面也存在一系列差异，例如与健康相关的互联网使用自己-兴趣和搜索方式，访问的内容和网站，对在线信息可靠性的信任，