[DDN] The Digital Divide and Human Health

[Champ-Blackwell, Siobhan]

Taran, I totally agree with all you have said! Its scary to think of people self diagnosing and self treating based on what they might read on the Internet. There are great resources online that can help a person become better educated, follow preventive measures, etc. People have to learn to evaluate the information they find online - and this is especially true when it comes to health information. 

There are many applications that can assist providers - telemedicine, elearning, document delivery for keeping up with research in the latest medical findings - that become an issue when providers themselves face a digital divide. A medical librarian in Nebraska assisted one of their faculty who volunteered for three months in a refugee camp - the provider found herself in a position of running a program that she hadn't been trained to run, and was able to use, for one hour a day, the Internet café. During that hour she was in touch with her medical librarian back home, and was able to find the tools she needed to set up a clinic, train volunteers and update herself on what she needed to know. What would she have done without that Internet café? 

I liked the concepts presented in by Alan of Paperless Homework - combining health prevention with another learning objective - that's great. Teach people to navigate the Internet and evaluate what they find by using health as the navigation topic. I created this module http://nnlm.gov/mcr/ctc/ as a very basic way to do that. People are already using the Internet to find information about their health - lets help them do it in a safe manner.

Siobhan

Siobhan Champ-Blackwell
Community Outreach Liaison
National Network of Libraries of Medicine MidContinental Region
Creighton University Health Sciences Library
2500 California Plaza
Omaha, NE 68178
402.280.4156/800.338.7657 option#1,#2, then #1
siobhan at creighton.edu
http://nnlm.gov/mcr 
http://nnlm.gov/mcr/bhic/
http://www.digitaldivide.net/profile/siobhanchamp-blackwell  
-----Original Message-----
From: digitaldivide-bounces at digitaldivide.net [mailto:digitaldivide-bounces at digitaldivide.net] On Behalf Of Taran Rampersad
Sent: Friday, August 01, 2008 8:39 PM
To: The Digital Divide Network discussion group
Subject: Re: [DDN] The Digital Divide and Human Health

It is difficult to say that the digital divide and human health are 
linked, in my opinion. Socioeconomic status affects both the digital 
divide and human health. That said, sitting around on one's posterior 
most of the day while eating fast food or microwaveable food most 
certainly could be seen to demonstrate how decreasing the divide can be 
linked to poor health. Improper equipment - and sometimes even proper 
equipment - can lead to repetitive stress injuries such as the infamous 
metacarpal tunnel syndrome.

There are some that believe that human health can be increased through 
empowering users. I tend to agree on the bunny slope. But on the 
steeper, more slippery slopes this type of thinking can itself be 
dangerous to one's health. Even Twain quipped that reading health 
magazines could cause one to die of a misprint - on the Internet, that 
is an even more serious issue since not only can anyone publish - anyone 
does. While it is all well and good that people may read information on 
the internet that can be helpful, this does not and should not replace 
properly educated and trained members of the medical community. Reading 
about placing a chest tube is quite different than doing it; diagnosing 
a disease is something that people take years and years to learn how to 
do - and these people, Medical Doctors, still sometimes make honest 
mistakes despite their training. Should we expect better from those 
without training?

Technology, properly used, can facilitate health and quality of life. 
Improperly used, it can do quite the opposite.

And I haven't even really touched on the issue of children... a large 
topic, indeed.


Ilan Tsekhman wrote:
> As promised here is the suggested conversation topic for August (a few
> days early!).
>
> That a myriad of socio-economic factors influence human health is well
> known. But how about the digital divide in particular? Are there
> implications on human health resulting from the digital divide?
>
> Please feel free to share your thoughts and experiences on the subject

-- 
Taran Rampersad
Presently in: San Fernando, Trinidad
cnd at knowprose.com

http://www.knowprose.com
http://www.your2ndplace.com

Pictures: http://www.flickr.com/photos/knowprose/

"Criticize by creating." - Michelangelo
"The present is theirs; the future, for which I really worked, is mine." - Nikola Tesla

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