Health and Support Groups

What I found interesting about several of the readings for this week were the various perspectives being looked at. While the Russell et al. article about CHAIN looked at how researchers and practitioners share information with each other, the Farnham et al. article looked at how patients may use a social network. The Nutbeam article then discusses a model moving towards health literacy where access to information equals health empowerment.

1. From the Farnham et al. article, I did not find it surprising in the least that the patients generally chose to use their computer access to communicate with family members instead of using the HutchWorld environment that was created for them. It seems to me that, as the authors point out, there were just too few people in this study to really examine how social interaction might work. Having such a small group, with perhaps only a few people logged in at a time, makes it less likely to "bump into" people and, from my experience, if I log into a system and find that the environment is empty, I tend not to think about going back there. My question is ... seeing as this research was from 7 years ago, what would the results be now? I'm wondering if the internet has become so much more ingrained that control groups would complain about not having it. I would also hypothesize that the results would still be more time dedicated to talking with family, especially now with easy-to-use software like Skype available.

2. I think that the Russell and Nutbeam articles look at an issue that is somewhat related though in different contexts: the sharing of health information. While the Russell article is focused on people sharing/asking for timely, needed information, the Nutbeam one looks at how to help a society become health literate on a macro-level. In reality, I find the Russell article much more interesting because it describes a system and how it is used, though I wonder if, given more information, we could apply Nutbeam's model to it? Perhaps, perhaps not. My problem with the Nutbeam model is that it is more of a series of levels than a map towards a course of action. I never got the sense in the Nutbeam article about how it could truly be implemented (with examples, etc) and how its structure was better than what was currently being done. The biggest flaw that I see in the Nutbeam model is that I got the impression that he equates health literacy with healthy decision making, which I don't see as true. We all know that smoking and drinking are bad for us, but that doesn't necessarily stop us from doing it. Just like in the Farnham article, assumptions are made that because information or a system exists, people will use it . Instead, I think that the Russell article helps to demonstrate that people will use a system or information once a) they perceive a need and b) they see the information/system as being an easy way to meet that need.