O’Conall Street

The smoking ban is now well established across these islands yet there seems to be little drop in the numbers who remain addicted to the infamous weed.

 Josh Gilbert,a New York colleague and source of many a good blog picked up on an interesting New York Times story on this issue last week. 

The NYT covers a study to be published in the New England Journal of Medicine that finds there is a significant social factor at work in kicking the habit. It follows an earlier paper by the same authors that determined there was also a big social factor in weight loss.

According to Josh the research points to the enormous opportunity in healthcare communications to more and more create programs that defeat isolation, encourage participation, build community, and don’t just educate patients about treatment therapies but help improve health outcomes through facilitating advocacy.

The application of complex adaptive networks is becoming more popular amongst communications specialists and is driving our business proposition here at Weber Shandwick.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 30th, 2008 at 8:50 am and is filed under Business, Consumer, Corporate Communications, Corporate Responsibility, Current Affairs, Environment, Public Affairs, Public Relations, Science, The Media, Weber Shandwick. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.