What is the best way to filter the surge of health information?
Information alone is not what people want. It’s only the first step toward getting access to a service or an answer to a specific question. By itself, disseminating information to increase awareness doesn’t do a lot of good, unless that effort is coupled with action steps, connecting people to the service providers, hospitals, health educators, and cancer programs that provide care. In cancer prevention, the greatest opportunity is where we have good evidence that leads to actionable strategies for reducing risk or improving prevention and treatment. By growing the field of communication science, we can increase the impact of scientific discoveries on public health. There has also been an explosion of information about peoples’ genetic susceptibility for certain diseases. How do you foresee people using this information? As more genetic information becomes less expensive and widely available, what people are going to be most interested in are the things that they can do something about
