Over 70% of people have been exposed to medical or health-related misinformation. Of those exposed, almost half are not confident in their ability to discriminate between accurate health information and misinformation. Social media is cited as the most common source of misinformation.
Category Archive: Health information online
It’s time to stop using worthless online ad metrics. Click-through rates are the most used KPI in marketing, but they are useless. Click-through rates don’t correlate with any meaningful brand metrics. Billions of dollars are “optimized” based on nothing but noise. “One impression’ is one web browser making one server request for one advertisement. Human eyeballs have nothing to do with it, so it’s all useless.
Mental illnesses are common in the United States. Nearly one in five U.S. adults live with a mental illness (52.9 million in 2020). Mental illnesses include many different conditions that vary in severity, ranging from mild to moderate to severe. Suicidal ideation continues to increase among adults in the U.S. 4.58% of adults report having serious thoughts of suicide, an increase of 664,000 people from last year’s dataset. The national rate of suicidal ideation among adults has increased every year since 2011-2012.
SUMMARY: DTC message development and use is the most essential action to get patients interested in your product, but it can’t be based on unrealistic patient behavior modifications.
LEAD-IN: “What is the reason to believe?”. It seems like a simple question, doesn’t it yet? In today’s micro-segmented audience environment, it’s often hard to come up with one reason that might resonate with everyone in your target audience.
SUMMARY: The health information on Facebook is a danger to anyone who reads it. Experiences from current patients do provide some context but too often contain lousy advice. Facebook should post a warning on every page that deals with health issues that informs people that their physician is still their best source of information.
SUMMARY: Current evidence does not, therefore, appear to show a need for boosting in the general population, in which efficacy against severe disease remains high. Even if humoral immunity appears to wane, reductions in neutralizing antibody titre do not necessarily predict reductions in vaccine efficacy over time, and reductions in vaccine efficacy against mild disease do not necessarily predict reductions in the (typically higher) efficacy against severe disease. Source: The Lancet
SUMMARY: Falsehoods have been shown to spread faster and farther than accurate information, and research suggests that misinformation can have negative effects in the real world, such as amplifying controversy about vaccines and propagating unproven cancer treatments. Therefore, health misinformation on social media urgently requires greater action from those working in public health research and practice. (Source: US Library of Medicine) There is a huge opportunity to help online health seekers cut through health misinformation.