I’ve got a grudge against online Wellness information. The problem is somewhat simple, it’s difficult to know what to trust. I’m a healthcare professional, so I have my education, training, experience, and conversations with other professionals to help guide me to trustworthy content. That’s not my grudge, though. I’m wondering how other people make sense of the (sometimes conflicting) information, the sources, and what to trust when it comes to making changes in their life.
"On the internet anything goes and that's all right. But anyone can be an author and fake the whole thing. How do we filter that?" -- George Lundberg, editor of the online medical website Medscape.com and former editor in chief of the journal of the American Medical Association (1).
The question above was posed in the year 2000. That’s prehistoric ages compared to today’s online landscape. We now have smartphones, smart watches, facebook, twitter, SnapChat, TikTok, tide pods and more! The bar continues to lower to produce online content. That’s great for democratizing access to communication channels. It’s not so great if the information someone produces is unreliable or outright dangerous to others’ health.
The current standard for evaluating online Wellness information is personal knowledge, experience, and common sense. So I’m wondering how y’all fare when it comes to looking up information and deciding what to do with it.
(Photo Credit: Craig Adderley - https://www.pexels.com/photo/man-sitting-on-sofa-reading-book-1467564/)
First, some definitions:
To make sure we’re on the same page, I’m going to define some terms I’m using here. This is just to ensure we’re all talking about the same thing
- Wellness - "the state of being in good health, especially as an actively pursued goal" (https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/wellness)
My personal working definition of Wellness: An inherently personal process, in which a person pursues alignment of their values with their habits, routines, and other pursuits.
Wellness is many times split into various dimensions. Commonly among these are:
- Physical
- Mental
- Emotional
- Social
- Occupational
- Financial
- Recreational
- Spiritual.
Important to note, based on this definition - Wellness is not any physical, mental, genetic illness or disorder you have. Wellness is not a medical condition to be diagnosed or treated. It can not be given or taken away. It similarly cannot be bought, sold, packaged, or marketed. While wellness is socially influenced, no one else can define wellness for you, and you cannot define it for another person. Wellness is your own process to define, explore, discover, and pursue. Wellness is how you live.
Your Turn
(Photo credit: Fauxels - https://www.pexels.com/photo/photo-of-people-doing-handshakes-3183197/)
With that set up, I turn to the Publish0x crowd. I’d love to hear the crowds take on a variety of questions. When your gathering information on eating, exercise, stress, finances, mental focus, daily productivity, personal growth:
- How do you access that information?
- How do you decide what information to trust?
- How do you make a decision to act based on information you’ve found?
Your answers are greatly appreciated. This is *ideally* the start of a passion project for me. I plan to utilize crowd feedback and participation to develop wellness solutions that work with and for individuals (I have much more to say than that, but first things first). Tips received on this blog's posts will be directly allocated to people-centered wellness products and communities.
I plan to revise this draft and cross post to cent.co and hive.io. For those design minded, I’m thinking of this as a research phase of the design process. More to come!
(1) Health information on the internet is often unreliable. (2000). BMJ : British Medical Journal, 321(7254), 136. Retrieved from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1173379/.
