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December
2003
New Roles, New
Spirits
As the Center’s
11th year comes to a close, it seems that health behavior is
finally becoming recognized as a critical component
in solving the major health problems of our time. Behavior and
prevention were even cited by the Bush administration as ways of
strengthening Medicare benefits.
Media coverage of scientific advances in health behavior has increased
exponentially since we began, to the point that it is now a staple
of broadcast news, the third most frequent topic of Internet searches
and the cover story on one-quarter to one-third of weekly news
magazines.
But the academic study of health behavior has yet to produce interventions
that actually make significant changes in the health of the population
at large. There is still a low level of adherence to medical recommendations
for completing your course of antibiotics or for quitting smoking.
In addition, increases in chronic disease and reduced access to
care leave people increasingly on their own in making complex health
decisions.
Clearly there is a growing
imperative for us to better understand — and
make use of — knowledge about how to provide information
and incentives to help people make the right choices about their
health.
There are some who would
say that, between the scarce resources available to study health
behavior and the successes achieved to
date, an increased focus on a few critical topics — smoking
and exercise, for example — is the best solution.
I take a more expansive view. We know a lot about both of these
behaviors that might be applied to a wider range of health conduct
and that testing our knowledge and interventions outside this small
domain will bring in much-needed air and light, new colleagues,
new ideas, new disciplines and new sources of support.
So let’s apply
what we do know to topics as diverse as choosing a health plan
how to implement community-level asthma control programs.
Accomplishing this will require a spirit of entrepreneurship on
the part of researchers and practitioners and a new role for their
professional societies. This new study of health behavior will
welcome the perspectives of private industry, of advertising and
of marketing. It is possible to find common ground and develop
partnerships with commercial interests, and it is time to stop
avoiding them out of jealous pique at their successes.
It requires leadership, the willingness to do things differently
and a spirit of generosity in inviting other disciplines with different
expertise to join in the pursuit of solutions. Mostly, it requires
optimism about what a broadly interdisciplinary study of behavior
can achieve in improved health.
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