We are in an environment where health-related news is shared unlimitedly in the media and social media. It is important to interpret health related information and news correctly. Health literacy is of great importance at this point.
Health literacy is of concern to everyone involved in health promotion and protection, disease prevention and early screening, health care and maintenance, and policy making. Health literacy skills are needed for dialogue and discussion, reading health information, interpreting charts, making decisions about participating in research studies, using medical tools for personal or familial health carecalculating timing or dosage of medicine, or voting on health or environmental issues.
Dear Ilhami Unluoglu
This is a global problem. Healthcare today is an area where capitalism uses it to profit. It uses people's fears to achieve this. Then it is necessary to make people overcome their fears. For this, it is necessary to increase the level of knowledge. People are not afraid if they know. Information pollution in social media and on the internet should be prevented. For example, Covid-19 is currently used only as a horror tool in some media. Is it really that scary? In the past, for example, H1N5 has been used in the same way. To increase human knowledge for all problems, applications can be developed for mobile phones or computers. This application can take part in the inquiry. Do not be afraid in the answers section, it can be said that you can overcome this with the following measures.
One clear cut impact route: journalist contacts.
Every academic professional has the opportunity to at least incrementally make contact with journalists and reporters. Most are trained to extract some comment from a "researcher not involved in the study." When a journalist has 35 minutes to write an article with a catchy or fear-based title on a highly complicated topic, they might expect to spend 5 minutes getting perfunctory comment via at least some researcher typically via a phone conversation.
I firmly believe that at least 10% of these journalists at any given time might be paying attention to the content of what they hear, even if this interferes with article simplicity. In these cases, I believe that contacted researchers could mitigate the oversimplification. The headline "XYZ linked to death", for example, could be transformed into "XYZ may be linked to death" or, in rare cases, something toward, "XYZ sometimes linked to death if in conjunction with extreme protein deficiency."
Interested in impacting this?
Pragmatically, any researcher could put together a simple 1/2 page bio entitled "Researcher at [Name] University.... Available for scientific comment on the following topics", followed by a bullet point list of mostly non-technical terms. Next, if you read a media article matching your interest, and have something to say about it, use the listed author contact to send your bio to that author. In your letter, (1) Praise the author for covering the important topic, (2) Provide some highly specific comment on their work that would seem to, if anything, support what they wrote, (3) clarify how you are happy to help them with any future public education story coverage they might be doing on related topics in the future. You won't be able to impact the article triggering your letter, but if you come across as friendly and approachable you will be filed as competitive asset.
The above process will gradually lead to increasing numbers of contacts into you over the course of any given year by such reporters.
Side effect: want your own research promoted? The above could serve as your own marketing army. You'll be able to write up your own non-technical summary and you can supply your own list of peers -- not involved with your research -- with their contact information, for the author to contact. You could even indicate how you suspect these different researchers might provide different slants or points of emphasis.
Remember, thousands or maybe even millions of people with almost no science background are going to learn about a scientific finding as reported by a reporter with almost no science background, working on a deadline to spend maybe 45 minutes (or potentially much longer) writing up the story. You can influence how that happens.
This is something that pretty much none of us will ever do.
But we all could.
Dear Soner Çetinkaya and Eric Klein thanks for your detailed and comprehensive answers.
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