Midwife-moderated social media groups as a validated information source for women during pregnancy.

BACKGROUND: Widespread use of the internet has fundamentally altered the way people access health information and communicate with health providers. Pregnant women are a group who are particularly highly motivated to seek out information online. However, where mothers actually obtain their information, who they trust to supply it, and whether or not it actually fulfils their needs is often unclear. This paper examines the experiences of women accessing advice and information on pregnancy and childbirth through a dedicated social-media platform, mediated by qualified midwives. The study formed part of a larger research project that focussed on professionally moderated online learning in maternity care, and the role of online communities. This paper reports on aspects of midwife mediated information provision in the context of these online communities. METHODS: Two secret (i.e. private / invitation only) Facebook groups were created. Both groups were moderated by 2 qualified midwives. One group had 17 mothers and the other 14 mothers. Both groups ran for 35 weeks. DATA AND ANALYSIS: The data included the written and spoken words of group participants and midwife-moderators in i) face-to-face (n = 4) and online (n = 4) post-intervention focus groups; ii) one-to-one interviews with group participants and midwife moderators (n = 24); iii) the complete corpus of text-based interaction across both groups; iv) a sub-set of private message sessions (n = 24) between individual participants and midwife-moderators. Thematic analysis was applied to the combined dataset. FINDINGS: Participants found engagement with midwives and other pregnant women via a social media group convenient and accessible. The groups provided a safe space for the sharing and validation of maternity relevant information. Members trusted their midwife-moderators to ensure information was reliable. For many members, the group became the primary source of pregnancy related information. CONCLUSION: Midwife-mediated social media groups offer a highly effective way of providing individualised information provision and social support for pregnant woman. Access to a group can also significantly impact on perceptions of relational continuity.

Integrating Journalism Into Health Promotion: Creating and Disseminating Community Narratives.

Media coverage of mental health and other social issues often relies on episodic narratives that suggest individualistic causes and solutions, while reinforcing negative stereotypes. Community narratives can provide empowering alternatives, serving as media advocacy tools used to shape the policy debate on a social issue. This article provides health promotion researchers and practitioners with guidance on how to develop and disseminate community narratives to broaden awareness of social issues and build support for particular programs and policy solutions. To exemplify the community narrative development process and highlight important considerations, this article examines a narrative from a mental health consumer-run organization. In the narrative, people with mental health problems help one another while operating a nonprofit organization, thereby countering stigmatizing media portrayals of people with mental illness as dangerous and incompetent. The community narrative frame supports the use of consumer-run organizations, which are not well-known and receive little funding despite evidence of effectiveness. The article concludes by reviewing challenges to disseminating community narratives, such as creating a product of interest to media outlets, and potential solutions, such as engaging media representatives through community health partnerships and using social media to draw attention to the narratives.

Animal-Assisted Therapy for Post-traumatic Stress Disorder: Lessons from "Case Reports" in Media Stories.

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) can follow war trauma, sexual abuse, other traumas, and even be experienced by commanders for the PTSD of their subordinates. Medications and counseling are sometimes not effective, so new treatments are needed. Some years ago, I suggested that animal-assisted therapy (AAT) (pet therapy) might be beneficial for PTSD. A large randomized controlled trial is underway of canine-assisted therapy for PTSD. Randomized controlled trials are most useful in assessing the efficacy of a medical intervention as these trials control for known and unknown biases. However, due to their very nature and rigorous requirements, knowledge gained from randomized controlled trials may need to be supplemented from other kinds of studies. Here, I note that media reports of AAT for PTSD may effectively function as case reports and suggest further studies: For PTSD, these demonstrate that (1) AAT can be dramatically effective in improving PTSD symptoms; (2) there is the potential for benefit from AAT by multiple different animals besides canines for PTSD; and (3) AAT may have a role in preventing suicide in patients with PTSD.

Deconstructing cancer: what makes a good-quality news story?

OBJECTIVE: To describe an in-depth analysis of the content and quality of stories about new cancer interventions in Australian media. DESIGN AND SETTING: Search of the Media Doctor Australia media-monitoring website for stories about newly reported cancer interventions, including drugs, diagnostic tests, surgery and complementary therapies, that had been collected from June 2004 to June 2009 and rated for quality using a validated rating instrument. A mixed-methods approach was used to analyse data and story content. Data from the website on stories about other new health interventions and procedures were compared. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Differences in quality scores between cancer-related news stories ("cancer stories") and other stories, and between types of media outlet; differences in how cancer was reported in terms of cancer type, morbidity, mortality, and in the use of hyperbole and emotive language. RESULTS: 272 unique cancer stories were critically reviewed by Media Doctor Australia. Cancer stories had significantly higher scores for quality than other stories (F=7.1; df=1; P=0.008). Most cancer stories concerned disease affecting the breast or prostate gland, with breast cancer appearing to be over-represented as a topic relative to its incidence. Pairwise comparisons showed statistically significant superiority for broadsheet newspaper stories over online stories (F=12.7; df=1; P<0.001) and television stories (F=10.7; df=1; P=0.001). Descriptions of morbidity and mortality were variable and often confusing in terms of numbers, time periods and locations. Literary devices including hyperbole and emotive language were used extensively, mostly by the researchers. CONCLUSIONS: While reporting of cancer in the general media is of low quality, many of the poorer aspects of content are directly attributable to the researchers. Researchers and journals need to do more to ensure that a higher standard of information about cancer is presented to the media.

British media attacks on homeopathy: are they justified?

Homeopathy is being attacked by the British media. These attacks draw support from irresponsible and unjustified claims by certain teachers of homeopathy. Such claims include the use of 'dream' and 'imaginative' methods for provings. For prescribing some such teachers attempt to replace the laborious process of matching symptom picture and remedy with spurious theories based on 'signatures', sensations and other methods. Other irresponsible claims have also been made. These "new ideas" risk destroying the principles, theory, and practice of homeopathy.

Poverty rates in Venezuela: getting the numbers right.

This article looks at household and individual poverty rates in Venezuela over the past seven years. For more than a year, the statement that poverty in Venezuela has increased under the government of President Hugo Chávez has appeared in scores of major newspapers, on major television and radio programs, and even in publications devoted to foreign policy. There are no data to support such statements, and in fact the available data show a decline in poverty for both individuals and households over the seven-year period: the percentage of people in poverty declined from 50 percent in the first quarter of 1999 to 43.7 percent in 2005. Further, there is no evidence to suggest any change in the methodology for measuring poverty during this period, as has been alleged in a number of reports. The article also examines briefly the impact of significant changes in non-cash benefits such as free health care, which are not taken into account in the measured poverty rate, on poor people in Venezuela. Finally, the authors look at how the mistakes in reporting on Venezuela's poverty rate were made; an appendix gives examples of mistakes in major media and foreign policy publications.

Innocents abroad: Western fantasies of childhood and the iconography of emergencies.

In this paper I explore the emotional interests maintained by the imagery of children used in Third World emergencies. Boundaries between adult and child are reproduced through relations of paternalism between North and South, such that the infantilisation of the South exemplified in imagery of children works to secure the competence and maturity of the Northern donor. Drawing on both analyses of the cultural origins and meanings of concepts of childhood and psychoanalytic perspectives, I suggest that media coverage of disasters arouses both identification and strategies to ward off and protect from the anxiety this brings. The gendered as well as geographical distribution of qualities of children's innocence and experience are discussed, drawing on both general imagery of children and recent coverage of children and child-saving, particularly in the former Yugoslavia. Developing analyses of 'disaster pornography', the paper explores how children appear as the principal focal objects onto which attention is pinned and as the signifiers of distress. This is at the cost of dehumanizing both children, their families and their cultures, and rendering them passive objects of a western gaze which seeks to confirm its own agency and omnipotence to ward off its own insecurities. While aid organisations and campaigns necessarily engage with, and sometimes collude with, these reactions, the paper ends by suggesting that there may be strategies whereby images of children can function to comment on rather than maintain prevailing colonial and paternalistic relations.