we're doomed wrote:
EpiRunner wrote:
[quote]
It's also almost impossible to change people's risk perception once they've made their initial determination. .
This may be an unfair assumption from your username, but if you are in fact an epidemiologist, do you feel that your profession as a whole has any culpability for this stagnation with respect to Covid specifically?
I am an epidemiologist...do epidemiologists have any culpability? That's a good question. In general, we're behind the scenes math nerds. We're typically not the ones presenting information to the public. My specific role is as a faculty member in a public health program at an academic medical center. The thesis I referred to was for my MPH.
It's well known among public health professionals that we suck at changing the mind of individuals. Even if we can design programs that work at the community level, it's tough at the individual level. People are stubborn. It doesn't matter if you're a physician, educator, whatever. Doctors try all the time right? You should eat less sugar, stop smoking, exercise more, drink more water. How often do you think people change their habits because of what a doctor says? An individual is very susceptible to the notion that it will never happen to them. I won't get cancer, I won't get diabetes, I won't have a heart attack. They'll rationalize by saying they run or they do some other healthy thing to offset the negative. You can spend 7 minutes on letsrun and realize that once someone forms an opinion on something, no matter what counter information is presented, they're very unlikely to change their minds. In fact, they'll often double down.
When I wrote my thesis, e-cigs (the precursors to vape pens) were popular and seen by smokers as a safer alternative. Public health messaging on the topic wasn't very effective, and not only were smokers turning to e-cigs, but non-smokers were starting to use them too. The gist of my research was that we took a group of e-cig users and divided them up based on whether they had ever used cigarettes. We then split each group into the treatment groups and control groups. All participants were given a survey on their perceptions of cigarettes and e-cigs. The treatment groups then watched a video on the health effects of e-cigs while the control groups watched a clip of the same length from the BBC Planet Earth series. All participants were then given another survey. Basically no one changed their perceptions at all.
So to answer your question, do I think epidemiologists have some culpability? Maybe a little, but not much. Does the public health community have some? Sure. We need to figure out a better way of communicating. I don't know that it's possible to ever be perfect, we still have people who will argue about the moon landing or whether the earth is flat, but we can definitely do better.