Talking About Health; Why Health Communication Matters
A BLOG to support my book, Talking About Health; Why Health Communication Matters
How communicating about health reveals a role for political decisions about what research to fund.
June 11, 2012
Disney has decided to ban ads for junk food when it comes to kids’ cartoons. That’s some good news when it comes to media exposure and kids’ learning product names. The bad news is that it won’t take effect until 2015. Wow. Why? Contracts?
Read more in the AP story here: http://www.registerguard.com/web/business/28184338-41/disney-ads-junk-ban-sugar.html.csp
March 23, 2012
I am sure that you’ve all heard about it. But just to be sure we are on the same page, let me share a brief story about ‘pink slime’ below so you know what I am talking about. I guess one of my favorite comments I’ve heard during this discussion came from a vegetarian who stated, “If I knew where my meat was coming from, I might eat it.” For me, it is the use of the word “lean” that gets me. Count the number of times it appears in the news story here. It really makes me wonder how often I have purchased really ‘lean’ ground beef in the past and got it at a good price–but really wasn’t getting what I thought I was buying.. Hmm. And when did pink slime first get added to our meat supply? Anyone know?
February 6, 2012
My three favorite food groups are salsa, salsa, and more salsa. I prefer to have a beautiful garden of fresh tomatoes and onions and peppers to pluck and prepare my own salsa. But I don’t. So I use Green Mountain Gringo Salsa, the ‘hot’ variety. And I am forever happy when Dr. Oz talks about healthy eating and I find that my salsa qualifies. It has some sea salt in it but that’s the last ingredient in the list of fresh vegetables.
And then there is the message, ‘No Genetically Modified Ingredients’. I think they mean to say, ‘No Genetically Engineered Ingredients’. I think that because what I believe is true about the salsa I love is that the ingredients have not been genetically altered with the DNA of one organism combined with another. No salmon in the tomatoes, for example. [read about this here: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/dna/pop_genetic_gallery/index.html ].
This method of informing consumers about GM content in food is called negative labeling — it tells us something isn’t present. In cases where there is no ‘negative label,’ we can reach the conclusion that there is such content in the food. We don’t know what. We don’t know how much. But we also don’t know based on any systematic research conducted over time whether we need to know.
http://youtu.be/MfTQergr29M
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…
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…
February 22, 2011
There appears to be no shortage of articles about concerns relating to the environment and Marcellus shale drilling in Pennsylvania[e.g., http://blogs.wvgazette.com/watchdog/2011/02/16/is-the-marcellus-boom-a-good-idea/]. Fewer concrete examples exist of action in this area. One exception is the organization, Trout Unlimited. The organization is partnering with the State, where loss of funding and the economy has contributed to challenges in efforts to collect data regarding water quality in the State’s streams [http://www.tu.org/conservation/eastern-conservation/marcellus-shale-project].
Volunteers will be trained to collect water samples. That is an important first step. It is less clear what happens next. Where will the samples be evaluated? How will data be stored? It is important to plan for consistency and to identify now any problems related to evaluating the water samples. If we fail to plan now, then the findings will be suspect later. So certification of the folks collecting the water samples is important. But we don’t want their hard work and training to be lost in warehouses where samples stockpile with no one to evaluate and track them. We also don’t want results to be discounted because the assessment of samples isn’t consistent or valid…
January 12, 2011
I talk a bit about the National Institutes of Health –NIH [http://www.nih.gov/]– in the chapter, “What’s politics got to do with it?” The various institutes and centers in NIH [http://www.nih.gov/icd/index.html] give a sense of where and about what issues, conditions, disease — such as the eye institute, the national cancer institute, the institue on aging, the heart lung & blood institute to name a few — decisions will be made regarding research and federal funding for the research. The Office for Research on Women’s Health, formed in 1990, assures that efforts will be made to include rather than exclude women from medical research [http://orwh.od.nih.gov/about.html].
The federal budget continues to include significant expenditures for NIH, with President Obama seeking to bring the 2011 budget to 32 billion [ http://www.aacr.org/home/public–media/science-policy–government-affairs/aacr-cancer-policy-monitor/aacr-cancer-policy-monitor—february-2010/white-house-proposes-to-increase-nih-budget-by-$1-billion.aspx]. As citizens, we should take a look at these decisions and realize that the ways that NIH organize predict the research that will be done…
November 18, 2010
Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford appeared on Oprah’s show this week…the first time they appeared together. And Barbra talked about her new book, My passion for design. She told us all about how some of the proceeds will be used for women’s heart health. She is supporting Cedars-Sinai Women’s Heart Center. You can read more about the center at http://www.discoveringforlife.org/whc.
Barbra asked Oprah if she realized that more women die from heart disease than cancer, and Oprah said, “yes…” with a smile and a comment about how it has been discussed on her show before. Barbra said it was news to her and that the idea that there is so little research that has been done with women about this issue was something she wants to change.
I was thus reminded of the past several posts in which this issue has been discussed and that we need to do a better job of communicating about the status of health science. More women need to understand that too few of us participate in medical research. Barbra Streisand is helping to increase awareness by talking about this reality.
But taking it one step further, even when research has been funded and could include women, women may not participate because families and jobs make it seem nearly impossible to do so. We need our families and our employers to support our participation. We need to ask them to support our participation. If not us, who will do it?
I have participated in clinical trials a couple of times as I describe in my book, ‘Talking about health’. I was asked to participate in research relating to the use of surgery for endometriosis. I felt that I could not say ‘no’ when I am always promoting participation to others and when I am always asking people to participate in my own research. But I had some questions and some concerns. I wanted to know how my privacy would be protected when researchers were looking at my case and seeing the laser treatment being used for my endometriosis.
I asked questions about my concerns. I learned that the recorded images would be of the internal activities, so my body as I know it was not going to appear on anyone’s screen. That was reassuring to me. I had several other questions as well, and asking them made me more comfortable with the idea of participating. In fact, now when I have a diagnosis that is a chronic condition, I ask if there are any reseach studies going on that I might be able to participate in. I hope you might consider talking to your doctors about medical research and how you might be involved as well…
November 16, 2010
Product recalls. Nutrition labels. Informed consent documents. Patient package inserts. Lots of people spend a lot of time designing these messages. Yet, research shows that far too often, no one reads them. Of course, one reason we don’t read them is because the print is so small, we need a magnifying glass to see what it says. Other times, we take for granted that the product wouldn’t be available if it was going to be harmful. Still other times, we need to add up the content of product labels to know how much we are really getting. Too much of an ingredient, such as aspirin, can cause serious health problems and may occur because aspirin is included in creams being used for joint pain or products being used to treat cold symptoms or any number of other combinations of things being used that individually do not pose a risk but combined can even be deadly.
Warning labels provide another way that policmakers are trying to assure that we have information to protect our health. Warning labels are designed to get our attention with a signal work about a hazard: caution, danger, or often–warning. The label also includes a statement about what makes the product risky. For example, if it contains alcohol, then it may be flammable. If it contains an herb, it may interact with prescribed medication or the drug to be used for your medical procedure. The label may also include a way to avoid the harm, such as talking with your doctor about using the product. And it may include content about outcomes that could occur, although these may be worded abstractly, such as–“adverse reaction”–meaning what exactly?
In the end, it is still up to us. Policies give us the chance to gain some information. They can’t make us read the labels and use them to make decisions…
