5.1: Introduction
What people believe about their health is highly personal and directly impacts their health-related behaviors. Perhaps this is because many cultures, religions, and ideologies attach morality to health behaviors, or perhaps this is because of the high value a person ascribes to their own health. Whatever the reason for strongly held health beliefs, the ways people get health information and guidance to develop these beliefs is of utmost importance. Providing accurate health information is one of the essential services of public health, and this role is becoming increasingly important as the contemporary infoscape is rife with disinformation, misinformation, conspiracies, and grifts.
So where do we get trustworthy public health information? We might go to the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), National Institute of Health (NIH), or World Health Organization (WHO) websites to read the current public-facing guidelines on healthy living, news articles on health discoveries or advancements, or toolkits for doctors, nurses, and community health workers. But let’s say we wanted to go deeper and read original research or even find surveillance reports. Where would we look for these types of ? And what do we need to know about research processes to understand this type of information? In this chapter we’ll go over the “infodemic” of health misinformation, the nuances of public health research, where to access trustworthy information, and how to understand it better.