Are we overpromising health benefits?
An article in today's New York Times notes that many "promises" made by health promotion/social marketing programs may be oversold -
"The promises are everywhere. Sure, you smoked. But you can erase all those years of abusing your lungs if you just throw away the cigarettes. Eating a lot of junk food? Change your diet, lose even 5 or 10 pounds and rid yourself of those extra risks of heart disease and diabetes. Stay out of the sun - who cares if you spent your youth in a state of bronzed bliss? If you protect yourself now, skin cancer will never get you...
In fact, science is pretty clear on all of this: There are real limits to what can be done to reverse the damage caused by a lifetime of unhealthy living. Other than lung cancer, which is mostly a disease of smokers, there are few diseases that are preventable by changing behavior in midlife.
But that is not what most people think, said Dr. Barnett Kramer, the associate director for disease prevention at the National Institutes of Health. Instead, they believe that if you reform you'll erase the damage, in part because public health messages often give that impression. "It is easy to overestimate based on the strength of the messages," Dr. Kramer said. "But we're not as confident as the messages state."
Eating five servings of vegetables and fruit has not been shown to prevent cancer. Melanoma, the deadly skin cancer, occurs whether or not you go out in the sun. Gobbling calcium pills has not been found to prevent osteoporosis. Switching to a low-fat diet in adulthood does not prevent breast cancer."
At most, Dr. Kramer said, the effect of changing one's diet or lifestyle might amount to "a matter of changing probabilities," slightly improving the odds. But health science is so at odds with the American ethos of self-renewal that it has a hard time being heard. Here, where people believe anything is possible if you really want it, even aging is viewed as a choice. LINK
An interesting set of communication and marketing problems get introduced by this article. Not to mention the ethics of promoting "fountain of youth" strategies. This is the type of information, especially when being promoted by the NIH, I'd want to have clients carefully think about during program planning. At the very least how formative research and message testing gets done for chronic disease subjects would need to take these potential concerns into account. If you're in a health agency, the brand and credibility issues could be measurably impacted as well.
Watch to see if this gets muck traction - Gina Kolata is one of the leading health reporters in the country, so I'm sure she's getting picked up in local papers as well. But it's a sobering reminder of what our science base often is versus what our professional biases may be.
7:48:05 PM 
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