Celebrity health and endorsements

A lot has been written about Paula Deen this week. Deen is a Food Network chef known for her Southern cooking, which is often heavy in butter, cream and sugar. Deen announced this week that she was diagnosed three years ago with Type II Diabetes. This by itself perhaps did not raise a lot of eyebrows, though some commented that Deen could have helped a lot of people in the last 3 years by being open about her illness and modifying some of her recipes for her audience. But it's a medical condition and if Deen wants to keep that private, that's her prerogative. What did raise eyebrows was that she announced her condition and at the same time announced an endorsement deal with a pharmaceutical company that promotes a diabetes drug. This generated a lot of reaction about celebrity and responsibility.

Most of the arguments about this seem to stem from the fact that Type II diabetes is affected by an unhealthy diet and the effects of diabetes can by lessened with a healthy diet and exercise. So does Deen, a celebrity chef, have a responsibility to promote a healthy diet instead of a drug? Does she have a responsibility to her viewers to discuss how the foods she cooks may affect their health? Does the pharmaceutical endorsement change her responsibility? Or should we just let the celebrity chef be a chef?

A bald Barbie?

What started as an online petition is stating to make national headlines. Two women started a petition addressed to the Mattel company to create a bald Barbie, a toy they say will be a symbol of support for girls undergoing cancer treatment or who experience baldness for other reasons. Mattel has been non-committal, saying they receive numerous suggestions for new dolls. But what support of the petition perhaps points to is the strong desire that patients have to affirm and even normalize their experience, especially the experiences of young patients and their families. A doll may not seem like much, but it may carry great symbolic value to a child who doesn't feel normal.

Cancer by another name

A Discover Magazine article examines the fear that the word "cancer" raises and whether it might be reasonable to stop calling certain diseases cancer. Specifically, the author and researchers at Dartmouth contend that patients with very treatable cancers, that is, cancers that will not progress, overtreat their cancers because of the fear of cancer. The reason for this is perhaps in how people perceive risk, and how people manage their anxiety about risk. Cancer sounds scary,and people are inclined to treat it aggressively in order to manage their anxiety about the unknown and to feel a certain amount of control over a scary situation. But overtreatment carries its own medical risk and can increase patient anxiety, even when they are undergoing treatment to manage their anxiety over the disease.

It is an interesting question: would changing the name change the perception of risk?

Talking to children about genetic test results

Genetic screening presents a unique communication challenge, in that the results do not only affect the person being screened, but may also have implications for family members who share that person's genes. The Wall Street Journal Health Blog reports on a recent study of how and what parents tell their children about screening results for the breast cancer gene. It's not surprising that typically children's reaction are in proportion to what they are told. But this study starts an important ongoing communication conversation that physicians, genetic counselors, and patients need to be aware of. Physicians and genetic counselors need to be aware that when they are counseling a patient, the words may get passed on to others. And patients need to consider what their family members want to know before discussing genetic tests.

Is this ad campaign too shocking?

The Washington Post On Parenting blog draws attention to a public health campaign in Georgia that is getting a lot of attention. The campaign uses stark interviews and images of obese children to draw attention to the childhood obesity epidemic. Some critics complain that the ads miss the mark, because they emphasize the bullying that accompanies being an obese child, rather than the serious health implications. Other critics think the ads are exploitative of the young children participating in them.

What do you think? Does this campaign miss the mark?