Chris Rock said some people have jobs and some people have careers. Those with jobs can’t make the clock move faster. Those with careers can’t find enough time in the day to do everything. Well he was right. I spent the past 10 days working afterhours on a proposal to improve health information translation. Read an excerpt from my proposal below.
Telling Health Stories Better: Journalism’s Role in Laying the Contextual Groundwork for a Healthier America
The emergence of the digital age has provided consumers with access to more health information than they have had in the past. This access has led to the emergence of the Internet savvy patient or e-Patient. The e-Patient researches his ailments online and is equipped to discuss options with his doctor. In fact a 2009 Pew Internet study found 86 percent of people with a disability or chronic illness searched the Internet for health information.A related Pew study shows 80 percent of Internet users look online for health information.
However, access to more health information – when, where, and how consumers want it – doesn’t alone translate into improved health outcomes. The grim reality is that most Americans have not adopted a healthy lifestyle. Roughly 50-60% of adults and 30% of children in America are either overweight or obese. In addition, many of the most common diseases that plague our society stem from poor eating habits and not enough exercise. Heart disease, a preventable condition, is the leading cause of death among men and women in the United States.
The information, in order to have impact on an individual’s health, has to be presented in a way that is reliable, understandable and actionable. Have you read a scientific journal recently? Scientific journals are clearly written for other scientists. The new digital landscape opens up new and exciting opportunities for journalists to engage consumers by explaining the health information that is oftentimes not effectively translated to the public.
Don’t have one? I don’t either. That’s because the topic of health is often very convoluted and quite honestly, boring. There is a new buzz-word in the health communication arena that’s aiming to change all that- “storytelling.” Using basic storytelling techniques can help educate, motivate, and empower people to make informed decisions about their health. “Stories Matter”, an essay by University of Missouri professor Jacqui Banaszynski, is a perfect example of using the storytelling technique on a subject that may be hard to relate to. Banaszynski doesn’t simply write about a famine camp in Sudan. She takes the reader (someone who may never go to Sudan) on a journey with her as she herself for the first time witnesses starvation, desperation and sometimes survival despite it all. This is a technique she uses to draw in and involve an otherwise uninterested and disconnected reader.
There isn’t enough storytelling in health and there isn’t a good enough reason why. Health communication’s goal is to influence healthy behavior choices by providing accurate and useful information, and what better way to influence than through stories?
The storytelling technique used in health can create health information that resonates with the target audiences. Often times in research you find studies devoid of the human element as if people were nothing more than a class, gender, sex or social economic status. Storytelling in health takes the “us vs. them” out of the science by bringing a universality of human connectivity. Banaszynski writes:
“We all grew up with stories, but do we ever stop to think about how much they connect us and how powerful they are? Even, or especially, in the face of death these stories live on, passed from elder to younger, from generation to generation. Events pass, people live and die, life changes. But stories endure.”
How can health communicators write health stories? You can take everyday people and tell their personal experience with health. Let’s take an example of a person dealing with kidney disease and who has to rely on dialysis treatment. Invite the reader into the story by painting a picture of what it’s like to live with this condition. Several trips a week to the dialysis center is non negotiable-it’s a necessity to stay alive. Show the reader what it’s like to spend hours hooked up to a machine designed to do what the body no longer can- cleanse toxins from the body. Through storytelling techniques like this example, health communicators can educate people in the community about kidney disease and steps they can take to ensure a long and healthy life.
It’s widely known in the health field that new discoveries in science and medicine vastly outnumber the actual utilization of this knowledge. Simply put, the information isn’t trickling down to the people who need it most. This disconnect presents a challenge to both health professionals and the public. The huge number of research findings published, disseminated, and reported on daily have to be interpreted by one and understood appropriately by the other.
So dig through the science and medicine and find these stories and provide a human element to them. That’s how people will listen to what you have to say, when you involve them in the story. There are many untold stories in health. These are the kinds of stories that should cross our TV screens, airwaves and web, but mainstream media don’t report on them. Health policy affects the public but we rarely hear about the latest policy issues being discussed in Congress. There’s an opportunity to take these policy issues and ask the public how they feel about them. Shed light on these untold stories, not only for Congress to hear but also to empower the people affected the most with information to make informed decisions about their health.
David Halberstam, author ofThe Best and the Brightestgives this advice to people who want to tell stories: “Telling a good story demands a great conception, a great idea for why the story works-for what it is and how it connects to the human condition. It’s about ideas, about narration, about telling a story. You must be able to point to something larger.”
And what could be larger than a long and healthy life for all?
Because I had no idea it was National Women's History Month. The White House just released a press statement on...umm...March, declaring this proclamation. We are suppose to "honor the women who have shaped our Nation." One such woman, is Lilly Ledbetter, a small town woman who took up a fight with a major corporation, Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co, in Gadsden, Alabama. After 19 years of work, Ledbetter was slipped an anonymous note revealing that she had been underpaid all those years. In fact, she was underpaid by 40 percent. Ouch! Of course she sued Goodyear, won more than $3 million, all to have the Supreme Court rule 5-4 against her saying she waited way too long to file her claim. Double Ouch! Although she didn't get any monetary compensation, her story reached millions via the media and brought the issue of wage gap mainstream. Thus, President Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act into law on January 29, 2009. Today, I honor Lilly Ledbetter and the many women who stood up (and stand up today) to fight even when they knew the battle would be hard. Happy National Women's History Month!
A study finds that the amount of time kids are spending on entertainment media has risen dramatically. Kids 8 to18 are spending nearly 8 hours on entertainment media, especially minority youth. The percentage of overweight kids in the US is growing at an alarming rate with 1 out of EVERY 3 kids considered obese. Michelle Obama kicked off a national campaign this year called, Let's Move, which is tackingly the obesity problem in kids. How can we use new media technology to leaverage our public health efforts?
Today I am remembering Bloody Sunday, a phrase given to the day on March 7, 1965 when hundreds of men and women were brutally beaten as they marched from Selma to Montgomery for their right to vote.
Can it really be that I've only created one post this year and it's already September?! Reynalinares is real to me and has been on my mind nearly every day so how is it possible that's I've only blogged once this year! Ugh! I suck! I've had so many ideas but never wrote any of them down because it wasn't convenient or because my blasted "real job" got in the way. I may have lost all my readers. Actually, I'm pretty sure I've lost all my readers. ReynaLinares will not give up, though. This blog will push forward with the original intent of focusing on health care policy, media and social issues. Stay tuned..if by some unlikely chance someone is reading this. :(
It hasn't even been a week since the Health and Human Services declared a public health emergency due to the novel strain of Swine Influeza A (April 26, 09). It feels like it's been a lot longer for me since I work in the field of public health and we take this kind of thing seriously. The media is also taking this seriously as they provide constant updates on the swine flu cases in the U.S. and abroad. The name, swine flu, makes for a novel news story. The novel strain - accurately called H1N1 - is of swine orgin, meaning it jumped from swine to human then mutated to transfer from human to human; so it's not correct to call the current virus "swine flu" since really it's no longer a swine flu virus. But hey, sounds exciting and scary in the news and we as humans (not swine) are drawn to exciting and scary. I'm surprised though that media is actually referring to it as H1N1 more frequently, but then again, what the heck does H1N1 really mean to the average non scientist...still kinda scary right? Just picture H1N1 is big print against a black background with doom do doom doom doooooom theme music playing on TV-scary right? I'm not convinced media is undergoing a transformation where being a watchdog for society is now taking front and center stage. I think that if it's going to make a dollar then it's going make the news. Plan and simple, it's about the ratings folks and H1N1 is MONEY!!!!
