Does awareness of a health issue, either personally or at the population level, improve health?
I am not convinced it does.
For example, consider the problem of smoking – which was clearly identified as a health concern in the early 1960s.
Or how about the problem of obesity – the current health epidemic sweeping our country, one which has had plenty of media exposure.
Awareness of these problems may be necessary to their solutions, but it certainly hasn’t been sufficient to their solutions.
This concept – that we need much more than simple awareness of a health issue to address it – is important to keep front of mind for healthcare social media efforts, which often seem to focus solely on the element of awareness.