Doctors’ WhatsApp Consultations From Family and Friends Fuel Stress and Boundary Strain, Survey Finds

For many physicians and medical students, the smartphone never really stops ringing. A new cross-sectional survey published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine suggests that informal medical consultations delivered through phone calls and messaging applications are not just an occasional nuisance but a near-universal feature of modern medical life, and that the way clinicians handle these requests may matter more for their well-being than how often the requests arrive.

The study, led by Kudret Selki of Düzce University in Turkey together with colleagues at Bolu Abant Izzet Baysal University, set out to quantify a phenomenon that has long been discussed anecdotally but rarely measured systematically: the steady stream of medical questions that clinicians receive from family members, relatives, and friends outside any formal care setting. Using a structured questionnaire, the researchers surveyed 191 participants drawn from both medical students and practicing physicians, asking about the frequency and characteristics of informal consultation requests received during the previous week, the perceived impact of those requests on work-life balance, stress and anxiety, and perceived violations of professional boundaries, as well as how participants typically responded.

The numbers reveal how pervasive the practice has become. Only 15.2 percent of participants, or 29 of the 191 surveyed, reported receiving no informal consultation requests in the previous week. The overwhelming majority, 140 participants or 73.3 percent, reported between one and five requests, while 22 participants, or 11.5 percent, reported six or more. In other words, roughly 85 percent of the medical students and physicians surveyed had been asked for medical advice by someone in their personal network within a single week, often multiple times.

The channels through which these requests arrive reflect the digital transformation of everyday communication. WhatsApp or similar messaging applications were the most common delivery method, accounting for 60.7 percent of requests, with traditional phone calls making up much of the remainder. The askers were overwhelmingly personal contacts: family members or relatives initiated 70.7 percent of the requests. Notably, the questions themselves rarely fell within the respondent’s own specialty, with 80.1 percent of participants reporting that the requests were unrelated to their field of expertise. And despite the potential for alarming scenarios, 98.4 percent of the requests were judged to be non-urgent, suggesting that most of this traffic consists of everyday complaints, medication questions, and second opinions rather than emergencies.

Those findings align with a broader research literature on so-called curbside consultations, the informal advice-seeking that predates smartphones by decades. A classic 1998 study published in JAMA documented how common such consultations were among primary care physicians and subspecialists, and more recent work has examined the specific challenges that messaging platforms like WhatsApp pose for clinical record keeping, data storage, and documentation. Emergency medicine researchers have likewise explored the ethical and liability questions raised when physicians treat or advise family members, friends, and colleagues outside formal channels.

What makes the new study distinctive is its attempt to connect this informal traffic to measurable occupational well-being. The researchers used a modified version of the Mini-Z 2.0 instrument, a validated questionnaire widely used to assess stress, workload, and job satisfaction among clinicians, and calculated a study-specific composite total occupational well-being score in which higher values indicated better well-being. They then performed univariable and multivariable linear regression analyses to identify which factors were associated with the Mini-Z total score.

The results point to a psychologically nuanced picture. Perceived stress and anxiety rose significantly with the frequency of informal consultation requests, and so did the sense that professional boundaries were being violated, with the increases across frequency categories reaching statistical significance at p equals 0.027 for stress and anxiety and p equals 0.021 for perceived boundary violation. Yet, somewhat counterintuitively, the modified Mini-Z total scores did not differ significantly across request-frequency categories, with a p value of 0.528. Frequency alone, in other words, did not translate into worse overall occupational well-being.

The multivariable analysis sharpened that insight further. The factor most strongly and independently associated with lower occupational well-being was not the number of requests received but the response behavior of the clinician. Participants who answered that they responded to informal requests only depending on the situation, or who did not respond at all, had significantly lower modified Mini-Z total scores, with a regression coefficient of minus 2.55 and a 95 percent confidence interval spanning minus 4.72 to minus 0.38, and a p value of 0.022. Clinicians who felt unable to adopt a consistent approach, whether always responding or always declining, appeared to pay a psychological price, possibly reflecting the internal conflict of navigating familial obligation against professional caution.

The authors conclude that informal medical consultation requests through phone calls and messaging applications are common and, although mostly non-urgent, may generate stress and a perceived violation of professional boundaries. Crucially, they suggest that the impact on occupational well-being may depend less on request frequency itself than on how these requests are experienced and managed. That framing resonates with earlier qualitative work, including a BMJ Open study exploring how general practitioners and medical students negotiate the boundary between their public-professional and private-personal realms on social media, and with a growing body of research linking digital communication burdens, from electronic health record use to secure messaging, to physician burnout.

The study carries practical implications for medical education and health system policy. If the psychological burden of informal consultations stems largely from ambivalence about how to respond, then training clinicians in structured ways to handle such requests, echoing frameworks like the 5Cs of consultation developed for emergency department communication, could help protect both clinicians and the friends and relatives who seek their advice. The authors also note that the research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors, and that the study was approved by the Bolu Abant Izzet Baysal University Clinical Research Ethics Committee in February 2021, with informed consent obtained from all participants. As messaging platforms continue to dissolve the walls between personal and professional life, the survey offers a quantitative reminder that the doctor in the family group chat is navigating a genuine occupational hazard, one that medicine has only just begun to measure.

Subject of Research: Informal medical consultations via digital platforms and their impact on the occupational well-being of medical students and physicians

Article Title: Burden of Informal Medical Consultations via Digital Platforms Among Medical Students and Physicians: A Cross-Sectional Survey

Article References: Selki, K., Demirel, M. E., Boğan, M., Karaduman, M., Ertunç, H. B., Bozkurt, Y., Akkaya, C., & Öztürk, Ö. A. (2026). Burden of Informal Medical Consultations via Digital Platforms Among Medical Students and Physicians: A Cross-Sectional Survey. Journal of General Internal Medicine. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11606-026-10944-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11606-026-10944-z

Keywords: informal medical consultation, messaging applications, WhatsApp, occupational well-being, physician burnout, medical students, Mini-Z, professional boundaries, work-life balance, mobile health communication, curbside consultation, cross-sectional survey