GIVING THE LIE TO OLD WIVES’ TALES
HEALTHMYTHS ABOUND
In briefing consumers on health risks, public health campaigns often rely on a catchy strategy: They list the myths about a behaviour or product, then follow up those misconceptions with the truth.
Check any Internet search engine and you will find “myths and facts” on health topics from abortion and acne to vaccines and weight loss. But new research suggests that even the sharpest consumer can be tripped up by these warnings because of a flaw in the way we remember what we read or are told.
As time passes, the studies show, people remember the health information they were given. But they forget which part was myth and which was the truth.
“Here’s what happens,” said Ian Skurnik, a psychologist and assistant professor of marketing at the University of Toronto, who worked with colleagues from the University of Michigan to study the phenomenon.
“ You notice that your grandmother has been taking useless medical treatments, and you’re worried,” he said. “ You tell her, ‘ You know, Granny, shark cartilage doesn’t help your arthritis.’ You tell her three times to make sure she understands, and she seems to.”
He continued, “But a few days later you talk to her again and find the warnings have had precisely the opposite effect of what you intended.” This common problem arises, he said, because in laying down a memory trace, the human brain seems to encode the memory of the claim separately from its context — who said it, when and other particulars, including the important fact that the claim is not true.
“Long after you’ve forgotten the context, the claim will still seem vaguely familiar,” Mr. Skurnik said. That is when a well-documented effect that he calls “the illusion of truth” kicks in.
Many studies over the last few decades have shown that unless people have some countervailing context or information to grab hold of, they tend to regard information that seems familiar as true.
To test the power of that effect related to health claims, Mr. Skurnik and colleagues gave 64 volunteers a few dozen bits of unrelated medical information that they were unlikely to have heard before, such as “Corn chips contain twice as much fat as potato chips” and “ Aspirin destroys tooth enamel.”
The researchers arbitrarily labelled half the statements false and half as true. Each item was read aloud and simultaneously presented on a computer screen at least once.
Half the volunteers were college students ages 18 to 25. The others were healthy adults, ages 71 to 86. Thirty minutes after the volunteers had seen the information, the researchers showed them another list of items that contained all the previous statements, with some new items mixed in. They were asked to identify which statements were false, which were true and which were new. The same kind of quiz was repeated three days later.
The results, published in the
March, 2005, issue of The Journal of Consumer Research, showed that the older adults were much more likely than the younger ones to misremember the false statements as true, an effect that was exacerbated three days later.
“I think the message to physicians from this study and others is that even if you have lots to tell your patient in an office visit, you have to tell them several ways and over time to make sure they understand,” said Dr. Joanne Schwartzberg, who oversees the health literacy program of the American Medical Association.
Dr. Schwartzberg advises patients never to worry about
saying to a doctor: “‘Wait
a minute, I need a little more time to see
if I’ve got that
right. When I go
home, you want
me to do this; is
that right?’ ”
Put t i n g
c o m - plicated health instructions in your own words and repeating them aloud should help anchor the information accurately in your memory.
But Mr. Skurnik said, “Don’t trust your memory.”
Office visits are often timepressured, anxiety-provoking, and packed with new and technical information — exactly the conditions most likely to jumble a memory of what was said. Whenever possible, get written information from the doctor, he said, and take a notebook to appointments to jot down instructions. It can also help to take along a friend or family member.
And doctors, he said, would do well to make sure that anything they hand out is written in simple, direct factual language.
“It’s not enough to ensure that people get good information from credible sources,” Mr. Skurnik said. “ You also have to make sure that they’ll be able to recall whether it’s true or false
later on.” The New York
Times