Talking About Health; Why Health Communication Matters
A BLOG to support my book, Talking About Health; Why Health Communication Matters
October 11, 2011
There is a new member in the family. My grandkids have a new pet friend. Her name is Journey.
And she reminds me of why kids and gentle big dogs go so well together. 
The dog is gonna get a lot of love… Something that comes through in this video as well.
http://www.angelfire.com/ak2/intelligencerreport/boy_dog.html
October 10,2011
Well, conversation at conferences can turn from the serious to the mundane but arguably serious. “Do you floss before or after you brush?” was the question at a recent conference. My answer: brush, floss, and brush again. Why? Who wants to brush before — yuck! But alas the American Dental Association provides a reason for flossing before brushing http://www.ada.org/1318.aspx.
In short, flossing gets the ‘yuck’ out so the fluoride in your toothpaste can reach your gums and promote health by reducing gingivitis. OK. Now you know.
Why didn’t my dentist ever tell me that? I suspect that dentists are happy if we floss at all…any time.
October 7, 2011
It happens. My library at home and in the office spills over onto the floor in my office. The floors at home. In the library. And the bedroom. There is the chair beside the TV. Oh and the table in the library. There is the tactic of placing a few books here and a few books there. All in the name of ‘decorating’ with books. But it reaches a critical mass and is just…too much. So I have selected some to part with. Before just dumping them into the local book drive box, I thought I would give you a chance to say that you would like to have this book. I will tell you a bit about it and how to have it [book jacket in tact and all] for your own.
First, let me just say that Penn State has approved a dual title degree program in bioethics, with Communication Arts & Sciences being one of the departments within which a student might elect to pursue this degree http://live.psu.edu/story/54735. I have always been fascinated and engrossed in debates about health, health care, and ethics. Not the least of these is the continuous discussion about whether access to health care paid for by insurance ’causes’ individuals to use more care–the moral hazard linked to insurance. It is because of my interest in this area that I’ve read hundreds [yes, ’tis true] of books dealing with the topic on all kinds of levels in all kinds of nations. And I own a lot of books on this subject–broadly speaking. Which brings me to this book.
Regarding the book itself, it is listed in this bibliography: http://www.qcc.cuny.edu/SocialSciences/ppecorino/SS640/bibliography.html regarding “General works in medical and bioethics.”
The book was reviewed positively in the Journal of the American Medical Association shortly after publication. http://jama.ama-assn.org/content/236/25/2906.1.short Notably, the reviewer comments on the fact that the book does not limit the topic to any one field but provides varied views from contributors in a number of fields. At any rate, if the topic interests you and you want this book, tell me so in the comment section. I will select someone to receive the book and go out of the blog to get your mailing information via email. Then the book will soon be traveling your way…
September 21, 2011
All has been quiet on the talking about health front. I am in the midst of teaching the undergraduate class about designing health messages at Penn State, so it is odd that I don’t find my way here more often. But in the fury of the debate over the Dr. Oz show about apple juice. [go here to read and listen to the debate if you want more information: http://www.doctoroz.com/videos/arsenic-apple-juice], I had to make time to add a few thoughts.
First, in favor of Dr. Oz — his show entertains us and informs us at the same time. We do have to remember that someone has to pay the bills for the show, so the entertainment quality has to be there. It is that simple.
The positive things about a show like Dr. Oz is that it can arouse public passions about scientific issues and lead to health advocacy. It may increase healthy behaviors and improve our vocabulary when it comes to talking about health and the science of health.
But on the negative side–it can be confusing and contribute to inaccurate understanding. It may arouse public passions but these can be misdirected.
The apple juice show and related debate illustrates both. The headline for the page above and the text beneath illustrates this reality. What is an “extensive national study”? According to the text, it means “dozens of samples” from “three different cities”. That is neither extensive nor a nationally representative sample.
How was the study conducted? Even with the several dozen samples, there is much room for the approach to vary. Did the tester shake the apple juice before drawing a sample? That might be important in terms of how the contents in the apple juice are distributed through the liquid. Did the tester take a sample from the bottom of the juice container or the top? Did the tester take more than a single sample of juice from each of the containers tested? Inquiring minds want to know…
But instead of focusing on specific and direct questions to guide our understanding, the backlash focused on name-calling. Skimming the contents of various letters from companies represented on the show and the Food & Drug Administration–FDA–“irresponsible” might be the most frequently leveled charge. Dr. Besser calls the Dr. Oz show “fear-mongering”. Watch this exchange:
I give credit to Dr. Oz for remaining calm and answering the charges.
But I wanted to know more about organic and inorganic arsenic levels, and other issues such as I raised above. I wanted to know less about Dr. Besser’s “upset”…
September 8, 2011
Imagine my surprise when I was listening to Rachael Ray’s cooking show and one of the guests was a female doctor who talked about a number of important health issues and took some questions from audience members. I was surprised that this guest was on a cooking show. But then I was surprised by some of the information she discussed.
Along the way, she told the audience that they should refrain from sexual intercourse for 24 hours before having a pap smear to screen for cervical cancer. The reason for doing so is to increase the accuracy of the test results. I always receive written guidelines about preparing for my annual mammogram, including such things as not to wear deodorant or powder or lotion. But I have never received any guidelines about preparing for a pap smear. Not on an appointment reminder card. Not face-to-face with the person checking me in. Not from my doctor. Not in passing in conversation with other women.
I wonder how many dollars we would save if women knew to avoid sexual intercourse for 24 [the recommendation in the attached summary says 48] hours before an appointment for a pap smear and followed this advice. Apparently, sometimes the test result will show something that seems to be a problem but isn’t because a woman has had sexual intercourse.
I looked online and found some guidelines at http://womenshealth.about.com/cs/papsmears/ht/preparepapsmear.htm. I guess I will make it a goal to check whether there are things I should do to prepare for screening tests I have from now on. I suspect if you are like me, getting these things done on the prescribed timetable is hard enough. Too easy to procrastinate. I sure don’t want to have to them again just because I wasn’t prepared properly the first time.
August 30, 2011
Access is everything. Access to health care. Access to education. Access to employment. Access to role models who walk the walk and talk the talk.
One of the followers on this blog brought the New York Times article, ‘Preaching a healthy diet in the deep-fried delta’, to my attention. You can find the article at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/22/us/22delta.html?pagewanted=all.
Why in the face of so many messages about diabetes, obesity, and heart disease would anyone continue to eat fried foods? Because it tastes good. And because we socialize and have fellowship with family and friends over meals that feature these foods. But Reverend Michael Minor and other church leaders have been working to change all that.
‘No fry zones’ and fruit platters, fresh water and no soda… these are the new ‘normal’.
August 22, 2011
Perhaps you heard stories last week about a brain-eating amoeba and the use of Neti pots [http://www.wdsu.com/r/28921234/detail.html]. I heard a headline first about a young boy who died after being at a fishing camp and falling into water where he apparently had contact with the amoeba and it got into his body.
I heard about the Neti pot and exposure to the brain-eating amoeba from my husband who asked me to remind him to tell our daughter-in-law about it because she uses a Neti pot. And your sister, I added…
“What can you do about it?” I asked. My daughter-in-law suffers from allergies and sinus problems and the Neti pot provides relief. I didn’t want to just ‘scare’ her. After searching a few stories, I learned that you can use distilled water in the Neti pot to avoid any risk. [http://abclocal.go.com/wpvi/story?section=news/health&id=8314285] Of course, I had to read to the very last line to glean that advice…
How about this: Neti pot users can avoid risk from amoeba by using distilled water. Open the story this way or use this in a headline to state how to respond to the risk. Repeat it near the end to reinforce the response. But avoid telling a tale that arouses fear without a suggestion about how to reduce the risk near at hand…
August 17, 2011
As my husband completed his annual check-up this year, the doctor adivsed him to increase his intake of omega 3. So my ears perked up when Dr. Oz talked about the supplement [ http://www.drozfans.com/dr-ozs-advice/dr-oz-omega-3-vs-omega-6-the-big-o-know-your-omegas/].
As with all supplements, it can be challenging to judge products and make informed decisions about their use. And this is not exception. There is a great example of this in http://www.omegavia.com/dr-oz-omega3-supplements/ where a nutritionist gives a different point of view than Dr. Oz gave about omega 3.
This is what I appreciated about this summary.
First, it does not present a recommendation that is EITHER — OR… Instead, it carefully describes omega 3 options. As a result, I am left feeling better informed about how to judge products containing omega 3.
Second, it provides research summaries, including the citations to the scientific articles that support the discussion. I was able to search out some of the work and get even better informed about omega 3. This helps me be a better consumer of this supplement and gives me confidence to talk to my husband about using omega 3…
August 8, 2011
I saw an ad for Anderson Cooper’s new talk show coming in September. The ad shows Anderson sitting with Oprah–an excerpt from an interview some years ago. She compliments him on his coverage of Hurricane Katrina. She remarks that he got it right when he said, “Hope is not a plan.”
I thought that it was a bit ironic in the light of the day… after our nation’s credit rating has been downgraded and the U.S. stock market lost 634 points… and the news is covering it round the clock–a reminder that “the audacity of hope” is …hope without a plan…
And what can we do about it? Stop listening? Stop talking about it?
We have talked about in this forum before, news coverage has been found to lead to compassion fatigue. As Susan Moeller wrote in her book about compassion fatigue more than a decade ago in 1999 [http://www.amazon.com/Compassion-Fatigue-Media-Disease-Famine/dp/0415920981], the effects of nonstop alarming news and no messages about concrete actions to represent effective responses: fatigue, exhaustion, and an inability to even feel anything about anything…
Here is the concrete action I seek: no matter how hard it is,
….stop responding by placing the blame on someone else.
Stop doing the same thing over again and expecting different results…
5 minutes of gardening improves mood… that’s something worth talking about.
August 6, 2011
I grew up in the Korean War era as the daughter of an enlisted Air Force father, with both my parents’ families living in Michigan. And both had gardens. 
[here’s a site with some great garden blogs… http://www.invesp.com/blog-rank/Gardening ]
My father’s parents lived in town and when you stepped outside the back door and turned left, you came to Grandpa’s garden… Row upon row of carefully tended fresh produce…including tomatoes that Grandpa picked and offered with a sprinkle of salt and a smile… We would both bite into our red ball and let the juice run off our chins…grinning at one another. Then he would pick tiny little cucumbers and we would repeat the same ritual… salt, bite, less juice…big grin.
My mother’s parents lived on a farm. The barn. The hay wagon. The cows that got milked… 
Flowers and flower bushes growing along the house, along the field, and in clumps dotting the mowed lawn. All things that fed into my ideas about gardens.
So it is the time of year when I am picking cucumbers from my own garden. I have harvested some tomatoes with more to come. And I have been enjoying flowers all summer long…
And I am catching up on some reading.
Prevention magazine in June 2011 had a headline: ‘JUST 5 MINUTES of gardening improves both self-esteem and mood [p. 19]. I read further and learned that an article published in “Environmental Science & Technology” reported these results. I wanted to know more… this turned out to be harder than I expected.
I went to the journal site…punched in gardening effects on mood, since Prevention magazine did not name researchers or an exact issue in which the research appeared. This kind of source-layering has been discussed here before… I was surprised and a little annoyed that I couldn’t find the study being reported so I could consider the evidence leading to the magazine’s conclusion. I read it in Prevention magazine which might be good promotion for them… or not — depending on whether a reader is willing to just take the magazine’s word about what the research concludes and how such conclusions were reached. It did get my attention but led to me asking: based on what?
After some time and leaving the journal site to just search Google more broadly, I found another article reporting about the research: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/es101129n. It appeared May 15, 2010 in the journal on p. 3649 and was written by Robin Meha. She summarizes the research that Jules Pretty and Jo Barton did leading to the conclusion that just five minutes… FIVE MINUTES of gardening improves mood… http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20337470 .
And that is why I like to garden so much….