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- WRC 1013/1023: Freshman Composition: Exploring Critical Issues
WRC 1013/1023: Freshman Composition: Exploring Critical Issues
Sources for WRC 1013: Christina Frasier, Darren Meritz & Pamela Mahan
Introduction: Health and Technology
This section contains two related subjects: a group of articles on E-Health, followed by a second box with a group of articles on Social Media and Health Support.
Technology has impacted the way that we access health information, obtain social support for health issues, and how we interact with medical professionals. In one sense, technology provides people with more power and control over their health decisions by providing resources for research and self-diagnosis. In another sense, self-diagnosis and access to medical information online can be misunderstood and misused by non-medically trained individuals. In addition to the ability to research various health conditions online and even receive an online diagnosis, people can now turn to social media and online communities for help and support regarding physical or mental health conditions.
What are the benefits of this access to knowledge and support? What are the dangers or downsides?
E-Health: Accessing Medical Information Online
- Lal, Shalini and Carol E. Adair. "E-Mental Health: A Rapid Review of the Literature"
"Objective: The authors conducted a review of the literature on e-mental health, including its applications, strengths, limitations, and evidence base. . . .
Conclusions: E-mental health applications are proliferating and hold promise to expand access to care. Further discussion and research are needed on how to effectively incorporate e-mental health into service systems and to apply it to diverse populations." - Loos, Amber. "Cyberchondria: Too Much Information for the Health Anxious Patient?"
Click on "PDF" link to view full article.
"Cyberchondria, a term which was recently coined and popularized by the media, is receiving more and more attention from the medical community as consumers become increasingly reliant on online health information for symptom checking and self-diagnosis. This column provides a background to the term, discusses the pivotal role which health anxiety can play in online health information seeking, and profiles a number of high-quality online symptom checkers as a way to help alleviate cyberchondria." - Lu, Tian, et al. "Internet usage and patient's trust in physician during diagnoses: A knowledge power perspective"
"Does patients’ Internet search of disease information affect their trust in physicians during diagnosis? This study proposes a research model from a knowledge power perspective, that is, Internet search affects patients’ perception of their knowledge level. Our empirical study of more than 400 subjects suggests that for patients who searched online for disease information, the inconsistency between their self‐diagnosis expectations and their physician's diagnosis reduces their trust in their physician. The effect is stronger for those who spent more time on Internet search. Patients with chronic conditions are less affected by the inconsistency, as are patients of physicians with a higher professional status. This study also found that physicians’ interaction quality in the diagnosis process—how well they communicate with their patient—still plays a dominant role in gaining patient's trust. This finding suggests that even in the high‐tech age, high‐touch remains an important factor to physician‐patient trust." - Lupton, Deborah and Annemarie Jutel. "‘It's like having a physician in your pocket!’ A critical analysis of self-diagnosis smartphone apps"
"More than 100,000 mobile phone software applications (‘apps’) have been designed for the dissemination of health and medical information and healthcare and public health initiatives. This article presents a critical analysis of self-diagnosis smartphone apps directed at lay people that were available on the Apple App Store and Google Play in mid-April 2014. The objective of the analysis is to contribute to the sociology of diagnosis and to critical digital health studies by investigating the phenomenon of digitised diagnosis via apps." - Te Poel, Fam, et al. "The curious case of cyberchondria: A longitudinal study on the reciprocal relationship between health anxiety and online health information seeking"
"The current study is the first to longitudinally investigate the reciprocal relationship between online health information seeking and health anxiety, i.e., cyberchondria. Expectations were that health anxious individuals who go online to find health information, experience an increase in health anxiety, which in turn will reinforce online seeking. A 4-wave longitudinal survey study among 5322 respondents aged 16–93 was conducted. Our results showed that individuals who are more health anxious than others, search online for health information more. Moreover, the results provided initial evidence for the expected reciprocal relationship between health anxiety and online health information seeking in respondents with non-clinical levels of health anxiety at the start of the study. However, this reciprocal relationship could not be found in a subsample of clinically health anxious individuals. Although for these individuals online health information seeking did not seem to exacerbate health anxiety levels, it might still serve as a maintaining factor of clinical health anxiety." - Swain, Frank. "Will Google's New Online Depression Test Help?"
"The article offers information on the plans of technology company Google to offer online depression test to people in the U.S., in partnership with National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI). Topics discussed include the views of Marjorie Wallace of the mental health charity SANE, on it; the importance of the self-assessment for diagnosis; and the questions related to sleeping problems or thoughts of self-harm in the test."
- Pluye, Pierre, Roland Grad, and Julie Barlow. Look It Up: What Patients, Doctors, Nurses, and Pharmacists Need to Know about the Internet and Primary Health Care
"This book shows how, by dint of an inquiring mind and a smartphone, rapid and accurate acquisition of knowledge keeps primary care clinicians up to date. It also shows how people can determine whether a test is more beneficial than harmful, and how information helps resolve disagreements and improve collaboration with patients and families, and among doctors, pharmacists, and nurses. In the age of easily accessible online information, clinicians have to think differently about how they work."
Social Media and Health Support
- Brusilovskiy, Eugene, et al. "Social media use, community participation and psychological well-being among individuals with serious mental illnesses"
"Little research exists on social media (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, etc.) use among individuals with serious mental illnesses (SMI). One particular question of interest is the extent to which online social media use is associated with these individuals' community participation, civic engagement and psychosocial outcomes." - Fergie, Gillian , et al. "Social media as a space for support: Young adults' perspectives on producing and consuming user-generated content about diabetes and mental health"
"Social media offer opportunities to both produce and consume content related to health experiences. However, people's social media practices are likely to be influenced by a range of individual, social and environmental factors. The aim of this qualitative study was to explore how engagement with user-generated content can support people with long-term health conditions, and what limits users' adoption of these technologies in the everyday experience of their health condition." - Gruebner, Oliver, et al. "A novel surveillance approach for disaster mental health"
"Disasters have substantial consequences for population mental health. Social media data present an opportunity for mental health surveillance after disasters to help identify areas of mental health needs. We aimed to 1) identify specific basic emotions from Twitter for the greater New York City area during Hurricane Sandy, which made landfall on October 29, 2012, and to 2) detect and map spatial temporal clusters representing excess risk of these emotions." - Naslund, John A., et al. "Naturally Occurring Peer Support through Social Media: The Experiences of Individuals with Severe Mental Illness Using YouTube"
"Increasingly, people with diverse health conditions turn to social media to share their illness experiences or seek advice from others with similar health concerns. This unstructured medium may represent a platform on which individuals with severe mental illness naturally provide and receive peer support. Peer support includes a system of mutual giving and receiving where individuals with severe mental illness can offer hope, companionship, and encouragement to others facing similar challenges. In this study we explore the phenomenon of individuals with severe mental illness uploading videos to YouTube, and posting and responding to comments as a form of naturally occurring peer support." - Park, Albert. ""Examining thematic similarity, difference, and membership in three online mental health communities from reddit: A text mining and visualization approach"
"Social media, including online health communities, have become popular platforms for individuals to discuss health challenges and exchange social support with others. These platforms can provide support for individuals who are concerned about social stigma and discrimination associated with their illness. . . . This study employs text mining, qualitative analysis, and visualization techniques to compare discussion topics in publicly accessible online mental health communities for three conditions: Anxiety, Depression and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder."
