Insights

<p>Depending on who you ask, an "informavore" is either really smart and well-connected or overly wired and confused.<br /><br />Jody Ranck is an informavore of the first kind. An independent consultant and pricipal investigator at the Public Health Institute in Oakland, he is working now to create the Public Health Innovation Center, which seeks to reign in the power of social media and mobile tools to "<a href="http://nomadologies.wordpress.com/2009/07/23/re-mixing-public-health-pl…; practices in public health.<br />

<p>On a Saturday morning, four people wait outside the front door of a converted mini-mall in Rosemead, CA. Ten minutes later -- the doors open exactly at 9 a.m. -- the two women and two men file into the lobby to sign in for their appointments at the Asian Pacific Family Center. The front desk is covered with pamphlets in the many languages of the significant Asian immigrant populations of the San Gabriel Valley. The clinic operates in Vietnamese, Mandarin, Cantonese. Cambodian Chiu Chow, Japanese and Korean, serving over 1,700 immigrant Asian Pacific outpatient families per year.<br />

<p>Shorter is better. Seven seconds on the Internet is an eternity. Human voices can add an emotional component to a story in a way that text never does.</p> <p>From top-10 lists to video clips to narrated slideshows, journalists are adding multimedia components to their print and broadcast stories to add depth to their storytelling, get more “bank for the buck” out in the field and create new audiences and distribution channels for their content.</p>

<p>Conventional wisdom has led the majority of us to believe that our health revolves around the choices we make as an individual. However, <a href="http://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/">research from public health</a> demonstrates that it is the social, economic and cultural conditions we live in that really matter. While this is old news for many health researchers, most people outside public health are still unfamiliar with these ideas, especially in the US. Journalists concerned with promoting health must strive to move beyond reproducing such individualistic explanations for health.</p>

<p><img src="/files/u47/LAC_USC_Emergency_Room.jpg" width="389" height="346" /></p><p>At 7 p.m. on a Friday night, the waiting room of LAC<a href="http://www.lacusc.org/aboutus/eng/emergency.aspx">+USC Medical Center's emergency department</a> is crowded and will get worse as the hours tick by. This public safety net hospital sees, on average, 450 emergency patients each day, some for ear infections, others with gunshot wounds.</p>

<p><img src="/files/u47/Watts.jpg" alt="Watts" width="450" height="301" /></p><p>In "LaVonna's World," people in South Los Angeles are able to buy healthy, fresh food at reasonable prices in grocery stores near their homes. They're able to see a specialist when they need to and get the health insurance they need. They don't suffer disproportionately from diseases like diabetes and asthma.</p>

<p>When your child dies because of mistakes made by a doctor, you can sue. Scott and Kathy Broussard did that when Dr. Andrew Rutland twisted their daughter Jillian Broussard's neck so severely that he separated her head from her spine. Most patients either lose in court or settle their cases. If they settle, they go silent. How many times have you called a patient's family to be told, "We can't talk under the terms of the settlement."? The Broussards settled their case, but that didn't stop them from talking.</p>

<p><em>Dr. Lipson writes his own blog called <a href="http://scienceblogs.com/whitecoatunderground">White Coat Underground</a>, contributes and helps edit at <a href="http://sciencebasedmedicine.org">Science-Based Medicine</a>, and contributes to </em><a href="http://blogs.forbes.com/sciencebiz/2010/03/hyping-a-supplement-for-hiv/… Science Business Blog</em></a><em> at Forbes.com where this piece originally appeared.</em></p>

<p>Clinical psychologist <a href="http://www.ncovr.heinz.cmu.edu/CVs/05_fals_stewart.pdf">William Fals-Stewart</a> should have quit while he was ahead.</p> <p>While studying drug use at the University of Buffalo Research Institute on Addictions, Fals-Stewart was accused in 2004 of faking his data in reports to the federal government. In one case, he said he had studied more than 200 subjects, yet he only had consent forms for about 50.</p>