Health Promotion Questions and Answers

Q: Dr. Seekins, what are some lessons you might have learned that you might share with us?
  A: One of the things I have learned is the importance for students to know how to implement these kinds of reviews now. Then there's a whole series of tricks that in order to limit the number of articles that get captured at any one time, the simplest one is manipulating the date parameter.

 

Q: For your results in the systematic review, did you break it down by gender? Were you able to see programs that are women with disabilities versus men with disabilities or anything like that?
  A: We don't have results broken down that way yet. We do have the data but have not yet had a chance to look at it.


Q: What is the most important thing you have learned that I should know as a person with a disability?
  A: Well, the first thing I would say is keep doing what you are doing. Because what we just heard was that you are doing all those things that these health promotion programs tell us to do, which is to be active, and eat well, right, and but also to inspire other people to keep doing that. I think your conversation, Mia, when you were speaking about standing up for yourself, being an advocate, knowing that you need partnerships to make things happen, I think probably one of the best messages that you delivered today is that we do need to be a team and work together to have supportive programs so that people can be engaged in health promotion without too much difficulty. I think that the more you can be active in your community, the more able to help with your overall health, being active in your community keeps you more physically active because you are going around from place to place but also brings those social supports.


Q: I really enjoyed the piece talking about the silos, working across silos. What do you see as the top couple reasons why we are not, why they are not being integrated?
  A: I don't think disability is well understood. I think for one thing it's viewed as a population that belongs to someone else. I think the one thing we really need to do is work on cost effectiveness, our health promotion and how they fit in because cost effectiveness is going to drive the policy. Researchers tend to work in silos for two reasons.

A: One, because funding comes in silos. If you want to work across disabilities in terms of functional disability, physical function, or intellectual disability, it's harder to get money than if you go straight for money in spinal cord injury, or in children with Down syndrome. The other reason has to do with the way we do research. It's really hard to find the many reasons between a varied group of people and what keeps them from healthy life styles. It’s a little easier to take groups that have a lot of similarities and find an answer. I think what people in research often do is have a narrow area of focus where they get credit for being an expert, and then if you are lucky enough to sort of move sideways a bit and then take on the broader issues where you know you will get criticized by scientists in your area, you can still have the fun of doing that kind of work that feels more meaningful and has sort of a broader societal aspect to it but it's very hard to keep both of those things going in order to get tenure and promoted and all those things so you can get more money to do the thing you really want to do.



Q: From your perspective, would the CDC and your colleagues be interested in opportunities to look at aging and disability in an integrative way?
  A: I don't know really how we could do effective look at aging without addressing disability in the mix. Twenty to thirty percent of the population over 65 is going to have disabilities. A large number of people who are aging have lost function but don't view themselves as having a disability. I think one of the ways is to incorporate questions about disability into our aging studies and if we are going to be looking at people who are aging, ask about their function as well.




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