Monday, March 22, 2010

The guilty conscience and health promotion

When we want to persuade somebody to do something, we always would like to tell him or her how much he or she will benefit from the new thing. For example, in most commercials the audience hears, “If you eat this new one but not that old one, you will lose weight,” or “if you buy this equipment, you will save heat/gas/time/money.” That is the same way healthcare promoters work in most cases. They give people new medicine, show them how to exercise and teach them to try new things.

But the first time I heard someone using a guilty conscience in health promotion was when I was talking with Katie Porter, a Ph.D student in UGA. She is working on the senior obesity issue in Northeast Georgia. Her job is teaching them how to cook healthy food and do exercise, like yoga. She mentioned guilty conscience because she just realized that she met a great challenge that when people take their poor health condition as a normal and common situation that also happens in others around them, they won’t change their lifestyle simply to gain some “benefit.”
The increasing body weight and waist circumference always are considered as the natural result of aging. Most senior people are satisfied with their bodies, because their parents, friends and neighbors all seem to be living the same way.

Exercise and healthy diets, all the ways for losing some weights, seem more attractive to young adults. Part of the reason may be that they want to become attractive in the society and gain more benefit by their health condition. But as a person ages, this motivation is also missing.
When this happens, the guilty conscience seems to become more effective in persuading older adults to lose weight.

So Katie Porter always tried to drive home the question about how much impact they are going to have on other people if her target population doesn’t change its behavior. For a senior, the main thing for him or her is to live independently as long as he or she can. If seniors’ health conditions become worse, they can’t take care of themselves, and may need somebody else to take care of them, even end up in a nursing home. And more money will go from the healthcare system to taking care of them. By getting that point across to those seniors, Katie Porter hopes she might be able to change their behavior. But so far, this is just a goal for her program and a hypothesis for her thesis. She and her colleagues may need more time before providing more convincing evidence in the future.

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