document: An eight-year study of Internet-based remote medical counselling We carried out a prospective study of an Internet-based remote counselling service . A total of 15,456 Internet users visited the Web site over eight years . From these , 1500 users were randomly selected for analysis . Medical counselling had been granted to 901 of the people requesting it -LRB- 60 % -RRB- . One hundred and sixty-four physicians formed project groups to process the requests and responded using email . The distribution of patients using the service was similar to the availability of the Internet : 78 % were from the European Union , North America and Australia . Sixty-seven per cent of the patients lived in urban areas and the remainder were residents of remote rural areas with limited local medical coverage . Sixty-five per cent of the requests were about problems of internal medicine and 30 % of the requests concerned surgical issues . The remaining 5 % of the patients sought information about recent developments , such as molecular medicine or aviation medicine . During the project , our portal became inaccessible five times , and counselling was not possible on 44 days . There was no hacking of the Web site . Internet-based medical counselling is a helpful addition to conventional practice
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