Media & health research program established
The School of Medicine has established a new research program that will work to understand the relationship between media exposures and health, with the goal of improving health outcomes.
The program for research on media and health (PROMH) will be led by Brian Primack, a faculty member in medicine and pediatrics at the School of Medicine and a researcher in the fields of media and health. PROMH falls within the school’s Division of General Internal Medicine.
“Youth and adults are exposed to media such as television and the Internet for the majority of their waking hours, and the messages they get can be confusing,” said Wishwa Kapoor, chief of the Division of General Internal Medicine and vice chair of the Department of Medicine. “While studies suggest some exposures contribute to drug use, obesity and violence, other media such as public service announcements and health-promoting video games may improve health. These are all areas we want to understand more.”
Primack currently leads projects testing the ability of media literacy to be used as an intervention in areas as disparate as preventing adolescent substance use and promoting evidence-based prescribing by doctors. Other recent research areas of PROMH include the influence of risk-taking behaviors portrayed in popular music, media portrayal of hookah tobacco smoking and differences between real and televised emergency medicine.
Primack said, “We often only hear about the ways media messages can be harmful to health. But the truth is that media messages are tools like any others, which can have negative influences in some ways and positive influences in others. Our hope will ultimately be to implement interventions to promote the positive and reduce the negative.”