Talking About Health; Why Health Communication Matters

Grammie, were you that girl who played ‘boy’ games with the boys?

August 2, 2011

Yes, Grace… I was. We were painting the swingset and ‘chit-chatting’ as my granddaughter likes to call it. Being a baby-boomer has its perks as I have this long view of such matters as ‘what girls and boys do’ and some opinions about how it affects our health…all the way from bone density based on early childhood through developmental years of activity versus inactivity to body image and weight. Or so I thought.

Why is it that the same divisions that seemed like we worked through in the past still remain? The boys always played together at recess…something fun like kickball or chase or even just ‘let’s go expore the other side of the playground.’ The girls always played together at recess…something like ‘let’s catch up on who’s wearing what’ [like we couldn’t all see that and who cares…] and ‘let’s play house’…

Much to my surprise, Grace told me as we were painting all about how she is the girl who crosses over to play with the boys. I knew she played sports at recess because shopping for clothes for Grace means buying something pretty and pink but something–like she is wearing to drive the tractor with Granddad–that she can hang upside down in on any number of jungle gym type toys… skorts–those marvelous crossovers between shorts and skirts are the perfect ticket and have only gotten much cuter over the years. She told me that her best friend is a boy. She was the only girl invited to his birthday party. She told me how there is one boy who sometimes plays with the girls…when they need a ‘daddy’ for their household.

Interesting, I told her. I was the one rolling down hills, climbing trees, and well–being a ‘tomboy’ when I was growing up, too. “A tomboy? What’s that,” Grace asked me.

Well, at least that has changed…

Do we have a responsibility for health and the environment? …and the sheet ‘experiment’…my ‘story’…

July 27, 2011

Look closely. That is a baby robin peaking its beak up above the nest line. Where? On my front door…

This is the view when I got a stool and stood up to peer inside.

There were two babies. Can you tell?

http://www.learner.org/jnorth/search/RobinNotes2.html#number%20of%20eggs This site gives a good overview about robins. You can guess their age based on the pictures there. They were probably about a week to nine days old…

I discovered them on a Saturday when I went to clean the front porch. I wanted to wash the door, so I put my hand up to lift the wreathe off the door and felt something — well, not part of my wreathe.. something really soft… I jerked back and went for the stool. You cannot really tell from the first picture, but the nest was hidden in the wreathe.

I worried once I saw what was hidden there that my touching the baby would keep the parents away… luckily not. Both parents spent all day every day for the next 10 days flying back and forth feeding the babies… And I left the door and the porch alone… except when I couldn’t help myself and had to have another peak…

We always have birds nesting around the house, on the gutters, above our lights on the deck… but never robins before. …and never on my front door. We had been hearing these sounds around the front door. They made our golden retriever bark sometimes. We would open the door… and nothing. I guess the parents were building the next.

It was the most blessed thing to watch the parents and their newborns for a week or so… I was happy to think that we have a place where the environment could nurture them. We have a lot of dragon flies this year, too… supposed to be a sign of a healthy environment.

A few days ago, I reported on Dr. Besser’s advice to put your pillow case and sheets in the freezer for two hours before going to bed… I am happy to report that for me and my granddaughter–this was just what the doctor ordered and helped us get to sleep in the heat of the record-breaking temps. For my husband, he said it made no difference… And so, Grace and I recommend it… John does not… 😉

What makes a good public health message–put your sheets in your freezer two hours before going to bed?

July 21, 2011

Yes, it is hot… And the weather affects our health…physically and mentally.

So, what are we to do about it?

I loved the message Dr. Besser gave on ABC News with Diane Sawyer tonight… ‘put your sheets in the freezer a couple of hours before going to bed…’

This is an example of a ‘good’ message. It is specific. It is doable. It is affordable…we mostly have sheets on our beds. We mostly have refrigerators in our homes and these appliances have freezers.

So, I am doing it. I will let your know tomorrow…did it work? That, of course, is one of the most important parts of a good public health message…

How do we communicate about responsibility and health?

July 18, 2011

I have been basking in the summer heat… catching up on some research and and reflection, and most importantly–my family. July is the month that my granddaughter, Grace, visits… and we have been reading the American Girl book that introduces Kaya…an American Indian. And that is what made me think of today’s topic.

Chapter 2 of the book introducing Kaya, the title is ‘Switchings’, Kaya and all of the youngsters old enough to share in the responsibility for Kaya’s mistake [leaving her twin brothers when she was responsible for watching them] gets a ‘switching’ — that is, she must lay face down on the ground along with all of her peers and pull her clothing up on her legs to her knees. Then the ‘Whipwoman’–elected by the tribe to administer switchings to the youth–takes twigs from a tree and gives the children lashes. The message is that what one of them does affects all of them… So, the bad behavior of one gets all of them into trouble….

Grace is 7 years old… I asked her what she thought about everyone getting a switching because Kaya had done something wrong. She said that it was fair because Kaya went off with two boys to ride horses when she should’ve been watching her brothers. So, she said, those boys should be punished, too. What about the others, I asked What about some of the kids who were punished who were nowhere near the other three kids? It seems fair…what we do does affect everyone, and everyone should support us in doing the right thing…

Interesting. I considered that I might use this book in my health communication classes this year to capture the many meanings of responsibility and health. Personal responsibility, as illustrated here, has more meaning than just what and how our behaviors affect our own health… It affects others, including the nation’s health care costs. But it is impossible to be responsible when all around us are people and ways temptinig us to forget about what we know we should do. And when there seems to be no support on the other end–no one and no ways to achieve the right things… ‘Switchings’…it is a good metaphor for what we are doing to ourselves as a nation when it comes to health and health care…

The picture that is worth a thousand words–what’s on your plate?

June 20, 2011

We just returned from our annual river sojourn. It is like a family reunion.

For five years, we have been kayaking with the same group of folks plus some newcomers each year, growing the family to more than one hundred paddlers on the water together this year, plus nearly a dozen expert guides to shepherd us along the 60 miles of riverway.

There really is nothing like the stretch of river that runs between Bedford and Saxton, Pennsylvania. This is called the Raystown branch of the Juniata River.

As you enter the Cypher area, you begin to feel the isolation… with literally no sounds of trains, highways, nothing but the beauty of rock cliffs on either side of you as you paddle along.

The outfitters were super in letting us stretch out between each other… In fact, the first paddlers in each night were an hour ahead of the last paddlers… One outfitter always assumed the ‘first’ position as the lead boat. Another outfitter always assumed the last position as a sweep boat…assuring that we were all in between them.

The rest spread out among us, assuring that there was assistance should it be needed. Because it isn’t all downhill moving water with gentle winds. There are some rapids along the way as well… just to keep it interesting…

As part of the sojourn, meals are provided. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner were served on plates that made me chuckle as I thought about Michelle Obama’s ‘food pyramid’ plate. You may have seen that she advised that we start talking about and using pictures of a dinner plate to emphasize what healthy eating looks like. http://www.choosemyplate.gov/

For Michelle Obama’s plate, half the plate is devoted to fruits and vegetables, the other half to grains and protein. ….hmm, on the sojourn, a typical breakfast was 4 sausage links, a spoon of scrambled eggs, coffee, some fresh fruit, and a biscuit or other bread…. more than half was protein, one-fourth fruit if you really dipped into it, and if you took the bread–that finished the plate. Lunch was a sandwich, potato chips, and a cookie…sometimes, some fresh fruit. No–the sandwich did not have fresh vegetables on it. Dinner? Meat or casserole with meat, scalloped potatoes or pasta side dish, a roll and butter, cake or pie or ice cream…. So, my plate this week? 2/3 vegetables… just to balance it out a bit. 😉

What innovations would make my life simpler and thus improve my health ?

June 9, 2011

As I noted in the last blog post, sometimes it is the simplest thing that could make the world a better place. I talked about a ‘nose contact’ and I promised to keep track of innovations that seemed like they would help me. I asked you to do the same… Here is what I discovered this past week…

On the larger playing field, I discovered that I rely on the internet to answer a thousand little everyday questions. For example, it is the time of year when I am attempting to do a bit of patio gardening. And I moved my three-year-old geranium plant from the indoors to the outdoors… I saw my husband’s grandmother move her geraniums from a Missouri porch into her kitchen each year…and back outside each spring. I wouldn’t otherwise have thought about trying to do this.

But this year, the plant isn’t producing any blossoms…well, very few. So I wanted to go online and see why. Only I couldn’t. The internet has been down more than it has been up at my house over the past week. Which is annoying since I depend on it for work and for information in a thousand other ways. Finally, we had to give in and have the cable company come over and check it out yesterday. Well, the signal is weak because the wire in the ground from the cable box has eroded. So–innovation number 1–why can’t someone make cable wire that doesn’t erode over a decade’s time?

And then there are my birds. I call them my birds because I feed them and have bird baths for them. I open my windows to hear them sing. I keep some bird houses in the backyard for them… two for blue birds and one for the martins. My mother’s mother had bird houses that are my earliest memory of the calm that comes from just watching and listening to these winged creatures.

At any rate, anyone who has fed birds from feeders on their deck knows that their seeds are a constant carpet anywhere nearby. As I was cleaning the deck for the season, I was shocked to see the literally pounds of hulls and well, bird poop that needed to be cleaned up as well.

Suddenly, having their feeders didn’t seem so wonderful. I looked online…of course… to see what others have offered in the way of solutions. Feed them only sunflower seeds without the shells… but realize this does nothing about the well, other end of the story.

I did quite an extensive search. Everyone just says move the feeders off the deck… Really? Can’t someone come up with a bird feeder where the birds fly into it, eat, are encased in a clear globe with entry and exit ports but the bottom half can catch the seed discards? Yes, that would be a solution to a dilemma that it seems I am not the only one facing… There are tons of online discussions about it.

And that would make my life simpler and thus improve my health…

…only 54,000 new jobs in the U.S. for May 2011… what’s wrong with this picture?

June 4, 2011

As a college professor, I get to bask in the reflected glory of graduating seniors each semester…especially every May. Until the past couple of years. Especially this year. This year, I hear the same story from students whether they were graduating with experience or not, an engineering degree or communication, and high grade point averages or just average. No jobs.

I feel their pain. I see it in their daily classroom attitudes. ‘Once upon a time’ is how they hear the refrain ‘go to college, study hard, and you’ll get a good job’… Maybe in the old days they say…

This in the same period of time as Oprah retiring and telling us all to live our best life… ‘Our best life?’ asks students whose parents sacrificed for them to go to college and may themselves be faced with unemployment or forced early retirements. How shall we define that life?

Of course, when there are no jobs, there is no health care insurance. When there are no jobs, there tends to be less healthy eating, as fresh foods cost more and fattening high calorie foods are…cheaper and often comforting in the face of disappointment. Higher rates of depression… So physical and mental health suffer.

And then last night I watched the ABC show, ‘Shark Tank’…wow! Inspirational, motivating… The person seeking money for his idea had invented a filter paper in the form of a “nose contact”–not his words exactly, but mine to help you visualize what it looked like if you don’t have time to go to the show’s online site and watch an excerpt. He did say that to insert the filter paper into your nose, you place it on your finger like putting in a contact…which seemed to be understood by all of the ‘sharks’–the panel with money to invest if they see profit potential in an idea.

At any rate, the paper is designed to filter out viruses and air pollutants. The person seeking money for his idea had a signed contract with another country for 8 million dollars and needed 500 thousand to produce enough product to fill the order. Well, to make a great story short, most of the panel wanted in… One even offered to buy the company for 4 million dollars and give the inventor a royalty. As discussion unfolded, two of the sharks teamed up with an offer, another shark made a separate offer, and then–they asked for a time-out and the contestant left the room. The latter three teamed up with a combined offer.

In the end, the contestant accepted it and did not sell his company. He now has 750 thousand in cash and three partners in his company…three partners with proven success in bringing innovations to huge distributions. This is an idea that is smart, solves a problem that is much bigger in many parts of the world than it is currently in the U.S., requires manufacturing–i.e. jobs…

Perhaps this is a path of living our best life in the 21st century…solving persistent problems with simple solutions.

I am going to keep a diary of the ‘problems’ or ‘challenges’ I face each day this coming week for which I have no solution but have experienced before. I will add to it notes about my own observation of media reports that suggest others’ problems. I will listen for insights about these matters in conversations.

Perhaps you would join me in this venture. Let me know what you come up with and let’s get a conversation going about these matters…

…cell phones and cancer…why now?

June 2, 2011

We have been hearing about the World Health organization’s conclusion that cell phones pose a health risk that is similar to lead exposure [http://www.latimes.com/health/la-he-who-cell-phones-20110601-1,0,3926296.story]. A summary of the report will appear in a medical journal in July. But advance news stories indicate that as with lead exposure, more exposure increases risk. Cell phone use rarely–less risk. Cell phone use for hours at a time and/or every day–greater risk.

Why has this report come out now? Last year, the U.S. National Cancer Institute reviewed research relating to cell phone use and cancer and posted a summary of their conclusions at http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/Risk/cellphones. It is tricky to read through the findings. They sometimes suggest that the issue has been directly studied. The ‘gold standard’ for clinical trials is based on randomly assigning individuals to a condition in which the thing to be studied is ‘given’ to those participants and another condition for which the randomly assigned individuals do not have exposure to the thing being studied. Thus, when the NCI reports about studies that have compared individuals who subscribe to cell phone service with those who do not, it begins to sound like a randomized trial. I subscribe to a cell phone service and seldom use my cell phone. My daughter has a cell phone service, it is the only phone she has [no land line], and she uses the phone–talks on it–a lot. So if we were both included in the study mentioned by NCI based on being subscribers, the results might not be an accurate reflection of a relationship between cancer and cell phone use. Subscribers who seldom use their cell phones, if included in the denominator of an equation designed to inform about risk, may artificially reduce the overall risk.

For example, if there are 2 cases of cancer in people in the population that is not subscribed to cell phone service–let’s say that is 100 people–and there are 2 cases of cancer in people in the population that is subscribed to cell phone service–let’s say that is 200 people–it suddenly appears that there are fewer cases in the latter…. But what if only 50 subscribers use the cell phone everyday….not even counting how long everyday–just everyday. 2 cases among 50 people is twice the risk of the poulation of nonsubscribers… Is that accurate?

So that has been the challenge for some years now. No one is going to conduct a randomized trial of cell phone use in which they randomly assign some people to be users and some to be nonusers, and then have some users use briefly everyday, and some users use for two hours, and some more…and track cancer incidence across yearssssss of the lives of the participants. So we have to rely on the research that makes comparisons such as the one described above. The WHO’s group of scientists apparently reached the conclusion that the nearly four dozen published studies reviewed with the thousands of particpants is sufficient evidence to classify cell phones as a possible risk for cancer. In view of how cell phones work, it seems a safe bet. And the ways to reduce risk by using the cell phone with a device that keeps the phone away from my brain is an easy and effective way to reduce that risk…

What does communication have to do with inequities in medical research participation?

May 4, 2011

“The cutting edge of technology is the bleeding edge of technology…”

There are inequities in who participates in medical research. Medical research thus contributes to disparities in who benefits from the research. Efforts to communicate to recruit participants to medical research are far-reaching–going beyond who participates to who fits the profile of a patient likely to benefit from research–based on who participated in the research.

We who participate in medical research are pioneers in the medical frontier. Whether we realize we are pioneers or what that means to any one of us varies. Our participation or lack thereof, creates disparities both in terms of who is participating in medical research and then in terms of who has access to the therapies linked to medical research. These are related and it’s hard to say where one starts and the other begins…

If research is being conducted with educated, well-nourished participants, it will be difficult to say that what is learned can be adopted by or applied to less educated, poorly nourished participants. And this example can be extended to a host of other situations where the research is conducted with one group and the findings are not used to benefit other groups because there is genuine concern that they may not apply to them.

What’s new under the sun?

April 20, 2011 GUEST BLOG POST by Caroline Gilson

Over the years, the desire to be tan led to use of tanning beds. Somehow, tanned skin is seen to be sexy and attractive. As many people have continuously begun to be “addicted” to tanning beds, their skin has been put in a dangerous environment.

Tanning beds have a different type of UV rays called UV-B rays. UV-B rays are more harmful to the skin than the sun’s UV rays.

The dangers of tanning beds have caused the need for educational programs to educate the public about the health concerns involving tanning beds. Research studies have been done to find out the best way to communicate about the tanning beds. One study in particular looked at the use of narratives, and statistics. (http://www.springerlink.com.ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/content/

457nhk7324q63501/fulltext.pdf)

This particular study discovered that both statistics and narratives could be effective in educating individuals about the dangers of tanning beds. Specific stories about real life people seem to grab people’s attention. Statistics about tanning beds on top of narratives help with persuasion and education about tanning beds.

The research has been done and now it is time to effectively educate the public about the risks of tanning beds. Hopefully, through health communication, society will make better health decisions…